


Blinded By Your Light.

by goingsllightlyinsane



Category: Peaky Blinders
Genre: #dont sleep with Tommy Shelby there’s like 30 chapters of angst, F/M, I started this thinking Tommy Shelby was cute and now I want him dead, Love triangles but more like love heptagones, No suing me for emotional damage (it's your problem now), Poorly written angst, Probably a very unhealthy relationship but I wouldn't know would I, This isn’t Ada/reader but I’m gay so it might as well be, because I just love them okay, heterosexual smut written by gay virgins, if you like commas and convoluted similes then boy is this the fic for you, in this house we are a slut for the Solomons beard and it WILL be mentioned a weird amount, it's gonna be a long and painful ride folks, seriously there's so much angst and I didn't plan any of this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-01-27 07:36:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21388459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingsllightlyinsane/pseuds/goingsllightlyinsane
Summary: Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it’s peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	1. Blinded By Your Light - Part 1. On Meeting.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it's peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.

The sunlight on the windowsill was more depressing than it was bright. Wan and pale, you knew that you would find no warmth there in the light of that cool, indifferent sun, shining on a fate much more dire than even its own fiery glory. August had not been kind to either of you. 

The last traces of summer were fading away, and everyone in the hospital knew it. Gone were the summery days when you could wake and catch the glimmer of hope that the sunshine had brought with it, the apple trees in the orchard laden with fruit and the last of the spring's bright blossom on their rich branches, the birds wheeling in the sky as though they could not hear, not far away, the rattle of machine gun fire and the sickening crash of bombs. In those clearer nights, sat upon your windowsill and gazing out at the unending sky, you could almost see the flames leaping from the wreckage of today's attack, the occasional flare shooting up into the sky in a sudden burst of bright green light, casting a lurid glow on the trees and fields below. 

And now the cold was seeping in, with its grim promise of longer nights and the worst that was yet to come, and the war was far from over. Sometimes you had to wonder how many men were left, as through the doors to the hospital there came every day the steady flow of men half-dead and some already long since gone, draped in their funeral gowns of stiff brown uniform and the bloom of rich red blood like roses on their unnamed grave. This war would leave no man untouched, and you could see the poison as it crept into the eyes of those who made it out of here, chilling and colder than that false bliss that washed over the still faces of those who weren't so lucky. 

It was the same routine as always - waking in the cool morning light to dress in the harsh white uniform and make your way to the dining-rooms for breakfast, eaten in silence in a crowd of sullen, sleepless faces, then working until late in the evening, all night if they needed you, as they did more and more these days. It was getting worse out there, though no one dared to mention it. 

It would be an understatement to say that no day at Flanders General Hospital was without a new surprise, still today had to be an exception. Walking into the main ward at 6:00 in the morning, the last thing you expected was for the ward to be filled with bustling crowds of nurses in sharply-starched aprons and men carrying stretchers. 

"Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? (What's going on?)" You turned to another nurse as she made her way past you, busying yourself with folding a blanket over the edge of a bed and scanning the room for clues of whatever had happened. 

"Il y a eu une explosion dans les tunnels la nuit dernière.. Un gros, clairement. Des hommes de partout. La directrice dit qu'il semble que nous allons courir pendant plusieurs jours. (An explosion in the tunnels last night. Big one, clearly. Men from everywhere. Matron says that it looks like we'll be running around for several days)." she whispered quickly, raising her eyebrows and gesturing wildly at the rows and rows of narrow white beds, already filling with bloodied men. You took in the pained expressions of the wounded men and the frantic ones of the nurses, and all at once you had to fight the urge to run away. You had never seen so many patients at once, and the noise was something that you knew you could never forget. The screams and wails and sobbing drowned all of your senses, and you wondered if Hell could ever sound so bad. 

"C'est affreux... Que puis-je faire? Dis-moi que je peux faire quelque chose. (It's awful... What can I do? Tell me I can do something)." You followed her as she set off briskly down the ward, collecting soiled towels from beside the beds. 

"Faites tout ce que vous pouvez voir qui doit être fait. Habiller les plaies, nettoyer les lits, transporter l'équipement. Tous sur le pont, vous savez. Ne les laissez pas vous voir rester les bras croisés. (Do whatever you can see that needs doing. Dress wounds, clear beds, carry equipment. All hands on deck, you know. Don't let them see you standing around idly)." 

You sent her a quick nod as she ran off with her armful of towels, then turned to the bed beside you, where a man painted with soot and thick red blood was splayed across a bare mattress. Grabbing a basin of warm water from the bedside stand, you set to work scrubbing his tired limbs gently, eyes wandering across the thin and broken form. Reaching up to his face with the now-blackened washcloth, you brushed the heavy mass of matted blonde hair away from his face, swiping at the cracked skin underneath in slow movement. He flinched, tensing up involuntarily, and the eyes that flew open to stare at you were deep and hazel and terrified. 

"Tu vas bien, tu vas bien. Je ne vais pas te faire mal. Sûr ... tout est en sécurité maintenant... (You're okay, you're okay. I'm not going to hurt you. Safe... all safe now...)" you murmured to him in your stumbling French, rubbing soft circles on his stained cheek with a shaking fingertip and wetting the washcloth once more. His whole body trembled and his eyes rolled around madly in his head like the eyes of a God forgotten. You wished you would never know what it was like last night. 

For the rest of that day, you were rushed off your feet with helping the patients. More and more seemed to flood in from all directions, filling the wards and drawing the nurses in like a swirling cesspit of blood and gore and pain. Grime was washed away, leaving behind faces that were somehow worse, haunting in their shell-shocked horror. 

By the time dusk rolled in through the windows high in the stark white walls, the ward was only beginning to quieten, the last of the soldiers carried in almost an hour ago. In a gradual tide of hushed movement, the nurses retreated once more into the dorms and the backrooms of the hospital, the last few remaining to sit by the bedsides and wrap and rewrap the same wounds in the soft glow of candlelight. 

Sitting alone on the windowsill of your dorm, you tried again and again to read, your brain dizzying in some other realm of thought that was nowhere near those bleak black letters and the story you'd read before. You'd moved here in a hurry, leaving behind everything you'd known before, and the books were no different. In your carpet-bag when you'd left had been only the three small novels you knew you could never live without, and only enough clothes to last you your journey there and back. You were meant to be home by Christmas, with all the books you could ever hope to read, but as time passed it was becoming increasingly clear that Christmas was going to be a long, long time in coming. 

A knock at the door startled you out of your thoughts, making you jump slightly and slam your book shut. You opened the door cautiously, and were met with the sympathetic face of another nurse. 

"De quoi avez-vous besoin (What do you need)?" 

"La matrone a envoyé pour vous. Il y a un homme dans la salle, anglais. Il est agité, il parle dans son sommeil. Vous êtes anglais, n'est-ce pas? (Matron has sent for you. There's a man in the ward, English. He is restless, he talks in his sleep. You are English, are you not?)". 

"Je suis. De quoi a-t-elle besoin pour moi? (I am. What does she need me to do?)" 

"Parle lui. Voyez ce qu'il a à dire. Il vaut mieux qu'il parle à voix haute plutôt que de déranger les autres avec son sommeil (Talk to him. See what he has to say. It is better for him to talk aloud than to disturb others with his sleep)." 

You sighed, pulling on your apron, wrinkled and creased from the day's hard work, and stepped past the nurse into the corridor. She placed her hand lightly on your arm and gave you a small smile, directing you down to the west ward, where all the British soldiers were lying. 

It was not difficult to see which one she was talking about. In the stillness of the ward, one bed was rocking slightly, the patient thrashing wildly in his sleep. His cries echoed throughout the room, piercing through the whimpering and sniffing that hung heavy in the air from all the other beds. A particularly loud wail stopped you in your tracks, and you wanted to throw your hands up to your ears and block out the dreadful noise, but you forced yourself to keep moving towards his bed, biting down on your lip hard enough to taste the hot, metallic blood gathering on the tip of your tongue. 

You sat in the chair beside the bed, pulling the curtains tight around the two of you until there was only the bed and you beside it, and in it the man flailing blindly in his horror-stricken fever dream. His hands dropping to his sides to clutch and tear at the bed sheets, you used the opportunity to reach out and stroke his cheek gently, hushing him and pushing the hair back from his sweaty forehead. Over his eyes there was a strip of warm, wet cloth, and you didn't even want to know what would be there should you move it back. 

"Who are you." his voice almost made you jump. Low and husky, with a thick Brummie accent, it filled the enclosed space around the two of you like cigarette smoke hanging in the night air. You had not sensed him waking up, but now his breathing was steadying and his body smoothing down against the bed. 

"A nurse." you soothed him, still tracing the soft white skin of his face. He made as though to sit up, trying to push up off the bed with unsteady hands, and you pushed him back down lightly, "Shh shhh... Lie down, Mr Shelby. You're weak." 

"'M not weak." But his voice was broken and uneven and you could almost hear the smoke in his lungs in the slight wheeze when he breathed. 

"Soon, no. But for now let's just let me do the work." He relaxed into your hands, his hands falling back to the bedsheets and you rubbed the back of one of them with your own. 

"Where am I?" he croaked. 

"General Hospital, Flanders. We found you out by the river, near dead." you spat out the rumour that by now everyone had heard. Five of the men half-drowned, half-suffocated, lying on the riverbank in a pool of soot and blood that seemed to spill from within them, like the war was in their very veins. Five men with no homes to go to and no way to get to them, and four without names. Only Mr Shelby, a name you could swear you had known in some distant lifetime, had been identified, and only he out of the five had survived, although no one was quite sure how. 

"Should have left me there." He stiffened, removing his hand from yours and trying to turn away from you, but his ribs ached and it was all he could do not to cry out aloud at the sudden movement. He made do with turning his head to the other side, and you caught the trail of dried black blood that ran down his neck and disappeared under the stiff collar of the white hospital robe. "Y' don't know what I did." His voice was hard and bitter, sad as you had never heard sadness before, but sad at himself, as though even the war was better than what he saw in the mirror every night. 

"And I don't particularly want to know. But I can't just let you die, considering my job." you joked lightly, smiling a little at him to cheer him up and then realising that he couldn't see you anyway, and your smile faded away into the evening gloom of the hospital ward. 

"Why don't you go save someone who actually deserves it." 

"I am, right now." you persisted, and he didn't know whether to laugh or to scream at you or to break down and cry. There was something about you, know you as little even as he did, that drove him a little insane, listening to you challenge him and contradict him as no one had ever done before, and he thought perhaps he liked it. Liked you, but that was cruel and that was weak, and that was something that Tommy Shelby would never do to another soul. 

"If you only knew the things I've done-" he chuckled lowly, bitterly, and you got the feeling he was laughing more at himself than at you. 

"If I only had a pound note for every man who's come in saying that, I wouldn't be washing and fixing your filth, now would I." and it was true - war was the cruellest thing you know, and it broke men like nothing else. First their bodies, then their minds, then their very souls themselves. In a job like this, it was very difficult not to think about souls, but you were sure that, somewhere within the prison of his broken body, Thomas Shelby had the most beautiful soul that you had never seen. 

"Would that you wouldn't, eh." He almost smirked - almost. His lips settled back into a grimace as he tried to laugh. 

"I'd have bought meself a set of uniform and be standing in the trenches as we speak." 

"So desperate to get to the front line?" He tilted his head as though studying you, and you had to remind yourself that he couldn't see you from beneath his blindfold, or else you were sure you would have squirmed under his scrutiny. 

"So desperate to get away from it?" 

"Need a way home. 'S work for me back there, and work must be done." 

"Then," you spoke decisively, smoothing out his blankets and straightening his chest onto the mattress, and he wheezed painfully at the action, making you flinch instinctively, "I suppose you ought to lie back and let me help you, else you'll never be out of here." you tapped him on the cheek softly, a motherly thing that you hadn't even thought about but now seemed too close, too patronising and at the same time too affectionate. You stood quickly, anxious to run away before he could react and tell you that you were being unprofessional, but as you turned your back to the bed you heard from behind you a quiet chuckle, breathy and honest, and the shifting of bones beneath weary skin. 

"Suppose I ought." 

You smiled at that, and walked away. 

________________________________________________________________________________

Early the next morning, they called on you again to make up his bed linen, ladling into your arms the thick reams of bleached fabric and shoving you in the direction of the west ward. As you saw him, lying on his back and grinning at you as you approached, staring into you with those unseeing eyes as though he had known all night that you would be coming back, you couldn't help but smile. You weren't one to pick favourites but this man was really testing your morals.

"You're back." his voice was still monotonous and weak, and his words hung heavy with exhaustion and a bleak, dark emotion that you hoped you would never feel, yet still you caught a hint of amusement. His statement seemed so decisive, like he had wished you back and here you were, just as he had wanted you to be. Even broken in his bed, Thomas Shelby had a curious power over you, and you hesitated to say you didn't like it. 

"Are you so disappointed?" 

"On the contrary, love. I quite look forward to our little chats." 

"And what's on the mind of the great Thomas Shelby today?" you laughed, snaking an arm around his back and lifting his torso off the bed a little, then pausing as he coughed forcefully to cover up the whine of pain that had slipped out. 

"Well wouldn't you like to know." he shot you a trembling smile as his body settled back into your arms. A thrill of pity shot through your heart and you pulled him a little closer into you, gazing down thoughtfully into his weary face and covered eyes. Somewhere between today and yesterday, those eyes had become the most important thing in the world to you, the only thing you wished to God you knew. Something deep within you was stirring when you looked at them, trying to make out the shape through the tough white blindfold, and you knew it wasn't good at all. Men like him weren't made for girls like you, and men with pretty eyes were only ever trouble. 

"Well now, let's suppose I do." you pulled back the covers and folded them over the foot of the bed. Looking back at his uncovered form, you couldn't stop your eyes from roaming. From the scars on his legs to the blood that hadn't washed away, to the tired bones that jutted out unnaturally from under withered skin, Thomas Shelby was exhausted, physically as well as mentally. Beautiful, so beautiful, and irreparably fucked up. 

You wrapped your free arm under his knees and pulled him into your arms in an awkward bridal position where you could smell the sweet, metallic blood in his skin and on his clothes and he could almost taste the harsh carbolic soap from that awful night before, you kneeling in the water in the darkness, scrubbing the taste of war from your skin again and again until your very soul could bleed white blood and the darkness within you seeped out through every breath into the darkness without. 

You almost threw him onto the spare bed that had been cleared beside him. 

"If you must. I'm thinking about you." he murmured thoughtfully, as though those words were much deeper than you could ever see, and you longed to see the meaning in his eyes as he stared, unseeing, up at you. 

"Nothing too saucy, I hope." you joked, but part of you wondered if you really meant it. You thought perhaps you wouldn't much mind it if he did. 

"Never! Get that a lot here?" He tried to gasp in mock indignation, but the breath ended up catching in his throat and he hacked and coughed violently, his eyes stinging with tears at the pain in his chest. Your hand flew out to grab his, and you rubbed small circles on the back of his hand reassuringly, holding him against your chest and rubbing his back with the other hand as he collapsed into you once again. 

Once the coughing fit passed you pulled yourself away, trying to ignore as best you could the empty feeling that rushed into your arms in the space he left behind, and the way he tensed up again as soon as you had parted. A trick of the early morning light, and you were beginning to get the feeling that that was a common feature of this man, with all his tricks and secrets. 

"Wouldn't be too surprised. Lot of lads missing their gals, and I'm just walking sex appeal. Or so I've been told." 

"Bothers you, does it?" there was a cold edge to his voice, protective, possessive even. If you didn't know better, you might say that Thomas Shelby was laying a claim on you. 

"Not too much. Flatters my ego, 's all. Got a girl at home, Mr Shelby?" and now it was you that was keeping secrets, trying to control your voice in what you told yourself was a perfectly professional question. Had to know if he had any emergency contacts, that's all there was to it. Still, as he let out a weak laugh and grinned up at you, you could not help but let out a long, shaky breath that you had not known that you were holding. Well, that was one thing cleared up at least, and you thought perhaps you might be happier because of it." 

"Tommy." you tested the word, let it roll off your tongue and fill your lungs with its false air, stain your lips and taint the sanctity of that unholy mind. A name you wanted to shout, to scream and to whisper and to plead and to say into the darkness in places you knew were much less professional than this white corner of the hospital ward. It was a name you wanted to keep all to yourself, and it was so much more than just a name. It was a confession, and it was holy. Nah, nothing at home for me but cold and dark and office work." 

"No family?" 

"None at all." he said far too quickly and you knew not to push it any further. There was trust and there was Thomas, Tommy, Shelby, and something told you that the two didn't coincide much. 

"Must be awful lonely." you almost felt bad for him, living all alone in his cold town with his dull work and his tiny little life, and you knew that you and him were not so different after all. For a moment it felt almost like you were lying in the bed beside his, and that these two worlds were somehow one. You felt united, and you understood, because this was a secret the two of you could share, and god, wasn't it domestic? 

"I shouldn't say so. Look on the bright side - I'm lying in bed with a pretty girl next to me right now. Not sure I should be so excited to go home just yet." your heart sped up a little with the last statement, aching and leaping at once with the fear of him leaving and the knowledge that while he was here there was nothing you could do but stay by his side. You almost didn't want him to go home at all. 

"Aren't you just incorrigible! What must the others all think of me?" you teased, pretending to scold him as you giggled and how long had it been since someone had made you laugh like this? 

"Hopefully not what I'm thinking of you, love, else we might have a bit of a fall out." his smooth, easy words and comfortable tone made your smile falter a little despite yourself, and you wondered how many girls he had told the same thing to before. 

"Been here too long. Bet you're just itching for a fight." 

"Told you I was no good." he said, half-joking and half-sincere, and there was an unnerving depth in his words that really should have made you turn and walk away, back to the others in their little back rooms and the laundry that really did need doing now. But you were right - it had been so long since you had seen the light of a proper day that didn't dawn on the cold grey wards and chambers in a country you had never loved before and now could never stand, and in your bones you longed for a story to take you far away, so against your better judgement you stayed, and all the more thought none the less of yourself for it. 

"And I told you that was bullshit." you chastened him softly, lifting him back into your arms and returning him to his now-made bed. You laid down his limbs carefully, straightening out his arms and legs and smoothing down his hair against the pillow as he sighed into the crook of your neck, thick, hot air that burned like kisses down your jaw. 

"You should really watch you're mouth while you're working." 

"Why don't you watch it for me?" 

"Take this bloody thing off my eyes and maybe I will." he grinned, but this time there was an earnest, almost pleading note in it that had your hands already reaching up to his face, and to the cruel blindfold that had so robbed you of the truest beauty that you had ever wished to know. 

With soft, tentative movements you peeled off the strips of adhesive that held the cloth in place, pushing aside the blindfold and, cupping his jaw with the other hand, tilting his head to look at you. Those closed, scarred eyelids, and suddenly they were twitching and fluttering, lifting heavily as he forced his eyes to open. And there they were - such bright blue stars that burned your blood and sent your heart to frenzy. And time had stopped around you, arrested in their brilliance, blinded by their light, and a bolder girl than you might say that this was all that there would ever be, for he was here and so were you and didn't it seem a lot like fate? 

"Beautiful. Nurse (Y/LN), you've been holding out on me." he almost gasped, holding your hand to his lips and pressing a small kiss against the back, his eyes on you like you were all that he'd been waiting for and you wished, you wished, you were. 

"Mr Shelby..." you blushed against your better judgement, and he hated himself for doing this to you. He wasn't entirely sure how it had happened, but somehow and so suddenly he was holding the hand of the most beautiful girl he had seen in a very long time, and she wasn't trying to run away. This was the most afraid that Tommy Shelby had been in his life. 

"Tommy." he chided gently, and your smile widened. 

"(Y/N)." 

"So beautiful." 

Your faces were closer than you knew you should be, the hospital far away and all around and you wondered if the others were watching you two now, pressed together and so close and still too far away. It was all you could do not to bridge the gap and kiss him, and in another world perhaps you would because then perhaps there was a chance that this could be something more than just a week in a crowded hospital in the grim hell of war. But as it was, you pulled away, closing your eyes so as not to see the light in his flicker and dim as you parted, a thousand times the worse to want his light. 

"I should-" you choked out, and his eyes were large and pleading and Tommy had no idea what was going on but he knew that this was the worst that he had ever felt and he could feel his very heart splitting in two a little as you stood to leave. 

"Or you could stay." 

"I really shouldn't." 

"Please." he whispered, and you wished and wished, and you began to walk away again, bed linen under your arm. 

"Sleep. I'll be back tomorrow." 

________________________________________________________________________________

It was not for him to know that, later that night when the other nurses had retired to their chambers and the dimly-lit backrooms of the darkened hospital, you crept once more out of the nurses quarters and down to the west-wing, where he lay, for once, asleep. Sitting by his bedside in the gloom, you longed to reach out and touch him, and knew that you wouldn't wake him for the world. He looked so peaceful while he slept, and you ached for him as you had for no other, wished that life would bring him rest like this again as you could not seem to bring him health no matter how hard he tried. Even now, in the purplish shadows of evening, he looked so small and thin, a ghost among his fellow men. He looked a world away from when he'd boarded his train to the front line, know that man as you did not. Something in him whispered that, just as it whispered that you should leave, and just the same you pushed it back and sighed into the palms of your hands, drunk with your bittersweet melancholy and the fear with which you loved him endlessly. 

And of course it would not mean anything that, when he stirred in his sleep, early in the morning and you still beside him, and began to shake and sob, you rested your hand on his shoulder gently and, for the first time since this bloody war began, you let yourself sing quietly to him. Snapshots of memories from a lifetime that had come before, softening in the blurred blue darkness and painting the world around the two of you, and for a moment you could almost believe that there were only the two of you in all the world, playing at games of war and house that were too old and too dull to tie you down. You could almost spread your wings and fly away to greener gardens where days were meant for living and nights for dreaming dreams that did not wake you colder than you began. 

To the sisters who would ask the next morning, when they caught you half-asleep in the chair beside his bed, you were afraid that he would have another nightmare and disturb the other patients, but even you knew that that was not the case. You were there because you wanted to be, and you wanted to be there because he was there, and there was no where else on Earth that you could breathe as freely as you did when by his side. 

But you didn't need to tell him that, because he was Tommy Shelby, and it seemed he had problems enough on his own. 


	2. Blinded By Your Light- Part 2. On Departing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it's peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.

And so it was that the days became weeks, and the weeks melted into an endless mass of sitting beside him and smiling more than you ever had before, and watching his smile slowly become wider and more genuine, like candy to your restless lips. Through the cracks in your stony walls, this stark routine of bed-changing and wound-dressing had slipped inside, filling your mind with thoughts and dreams of paradise, or spending time beside him not as nurse and patient but as something so much more. Perhaps even as friends. 

And all the while the days grew darker, the war ending in the midst of all this winter gloom as you lay with him late into the night, the radio playing quietly under the blankets and the two of you grinning like fools, and then all of a sudden it was lighter and warmer, Christmas passing by his side (you'd both promised not to get each other anything, but somehow when the morning came around you had both broken that promise, you sneaking him in an old pocket watch that you had found at a curiosity shop in the village and a music box which played the national anthem when you turned the handle round and round, and him finding somewhere, though you knew better than to ask where, a silvery silk scarf and a tiny golden locket, blurred slightly around the edges and engraved with a series of numbers so small you could barely make them out, and when you asked about them he gave you a subtle smile and brought a finger up to his lips), and then new year's day, and all of a sudden January was over and another icy February was drawing in, grey and rainy and exactly like all the millions that had come before it and, but for the man in the bed beside you whom you were trying so hard to convince yourself meant nothing more than this to you, it was as though things had never changed at all. 

But my, how things had changed. 

You woke and he was the first thought of your mind, your reverie in waking and the way your steps would lead you as soon as breakfast was finished with. Laundry in arms, you changed his bed and stayed a little while, chatting mindlessly as the morning slipped away to who knew where. Lunch, and then you were back to dress the injuries that had long since worn away to stretched skin and silvery scars. You knew he tried not to look at them - when his eyes roamed and caught the traced lines on his arms and legs he flinched and froze, your touch tearing his gaze away but not before a hundred million thoughts could flood into his mind that you both knew he would never say out loud. If you didn't know him better, you might say he looked better too. True, his eyes were brighter now, and his hands were soft and steady and his skin was clean, but deep inside you knew that you could find that same tattered black soul that had plagued your dreams before. 

"You're here." he greeted you, the same way every morning, not turning to look or moving at all, just the way he had at first and still you weren't quite used to it. 

"Good morning to you too, Mr Shelby." you sighed laughingly, setting down the basket of bed-linen on his bedside table and setting to work on lifting him out of the bed. You were beginning to suspect that, should you ask, he could probably climb out and run around by himself, but you had to admit that you weren't quite ready to relinquish the last shred of touch that you had felt since you had been sent here, false and desperate as it may be. But then again, these days it was getting more and more difficult to tell what was false and what was real, and a more foolish girl than you might say that none of it was false at all. There were days when you couldn't help but wonder. 

"Tommy." you dropped him heavily on the replacement bed in mock exasperation, "Tell me about England." 

"England? Why, I thought you lived there." you bundled up the bed-covers, folding them and draping them over the edge of the bed and trying to ignore the hot burn of Tommy's gaze on your arse as you bent over the bed. 

"Your England. Where'd'ya live? What'd'ya come out here for?" 

"Well for one thing, I never chose to come out here. Just happened, I s'pose. One minute you're still at university in the middle of bloody nowhere, working three part time jobs seven days a week, next thing you know you're being questioned by a bed-bound British soldier. Funny how life works." you grumbled, and he raised his eyebrows at your outburst. You supposed it all might be true. Yes, you had been a lot less than happy to be shipped off without warning, but since then you didn't really have much time to be really upset about it. And by the time the hospital had calmed enough and you had had time to yourself - real time, not just snatching seconds between the jobs and pretending you were happy with just that - he was here and you were with him, and there was nothing you could say about it other than that, fill diary pages as you might with all the things you always wished you could have said that day. 

"Is that really what I am?" Would that I could tell you what you really are, Tommy Shelby. Would that you would listen. 

"You are bed-bound and British and a soldier, aren't you?" you teased, and you tried not to look him in the eye as you lied through your teeth to save face. 

"Just thought you might be thinking of me as your guardian angel." he huffed, and you bit back a laugh as he pretended to turn away from you. 

"Let's not forget who's in the bed here." 

"Okay, point taken. I'll just shut my mouth then, shall I?" 

"That is not what I said at all." 

"Oh?" he seemed amused, glancing up at you expectantly, and you tried desperately not to blush. 

"Shut it, Shelby." you shoved him lightly and he feigned injury, groaning loud enough to turn the heads of a few of the nurses at the nearby beds, "Don't go giving yourself airs just because you're my favourite patient." 

"Oh I'm your favourite patient, am I?" your blush only grew at that, pooling over your cheeks and the bridge of your nose and setting fire to every nerve ending in your upper body. He seemed to have that effect on you a lot (and you tried not to think too much about the times when he awakened the nerves in your lower body). 

"Would that you weren't. But you're my shining star here." as soon as it had come out of your mouth, you instantly regretted it. Shining star? It was 1918 for god's sake, no one said that! It was so childish you were seriously considering launching yourself out of the window next to you, deciding that here, on the second floor of the hospital, the distance would be enough to break at least your neck. 

"That's a new one, I'll grant you that. Never been called a shining star before." you lifted his back off the bed and propped him up with pillows against the railings at its head so that he was sitting upright, you moving to sit on the mattress in front of him. 

"Hey show some gratitude mate, you're the doomed Brit the new nurse brought in and kissed back to life. You and I are the talk of the ward." you grinned, lifting his night-shirt off to reveal the wide strip of bandage wounded around his chest. Looking around him, he could clearly see the curious faces of a handful of idle nurses, congregated around the laundry table at the edge of the ward and muttering visibly at you both. You were right, by the looks of things the two of you were the talk of the town, and Tommy had to fight the way his heart leapt at the thought. Who would have thought that Tommy Shelby would go so soft? 

"You planning on giving me that kiss of life now or later?" he smirked down at you, you kneeling before him and peeling the fabric off his chest to take a closer look at what was now the last reminder that all of this was real at all. There was a day when you looked down at his body and the blood had gone away, and it had scared you to think that all of this would fade so fast, back into the body of God himself, and that one day there would be a day when he would look at himself in the mirror and none of it would be there before him and neither would you, and that day was coming around faster than you would have liked. 

He leaned in teasingly as though to press your lips together, and though you could tell by the smile on his face that he would not go all the way, your heart stopped all the same, aching to be closer, begging and screaming to touch him, to taste him, to love him. 

"Quiet, you! You'll give them all ideas." you whispered against his lips, scolding him but on your face there was no trace of anger. 

And your face was quite unreadable, Tommy scanning every inch of skin and lips and tired eyes for some kind of sign of what on earth you could be feeling, filling the gap between you with a tension that neither of you quite dared to break. He could swear he could see softness in there, swimming in the deep (y/e/c) of those eyes, a sweetness that made him want to kiss you here and now, damned be those other nurses waiting in their front-row seats, waiting for what could only be the show of a lifetime. He wanted all at once to see you as you truly were, the way you woke up, for he had seen you asleep in that chair by his bedside enough times to know that you were tired, of war and work and life in general, much as you would not have let him see it if you had known. He longed to see you anywhere but here and the frontline and grey and rainy Birmingham, those three dark corners he knew and another he could run to where surely the world may be a little brighter because wasn't anywhere brighter than here? He longed to take you with him, and he longed to run away so badly that he thought his head might split in two if he didn't tell you so right now, and he thought that of all the devils he thought he had known, the draft and the tunnels and all the agonising pain, that this might be the sweetest torture the war had brought to him, for he could never tell you, never have you, never be good enough to have you. Thomas Shelby was not soft, but Tommy Shelby was getting softer and you knew it, and it was more than Tommy could ever fear. 

"Love, you give me ideas all the time." he forced his smirk and tried to ignore the way your hand traced the spiderweb of scars criss-crossing over his chest, a spiderweb and he was at the centre, the dark and beautiful spider. 

"You're a right pervert too, that's what you are. I'll tell you something else. You're my fittest patient. One foot out the door already, you are." you pushed him away, trying (unsuccessfully) to stifle your raucous laughter by pressing a hand against your mouth where only a moment ago his lips really should have been. 

But all too soon your laughter died away, and his smile with it, and in its place the silence crept in to fill the void. It was heavy and it was awkward, with a blueish sadness that you had been trying to avoid for far too long. There was no way you could keep him here all to yourself - it was as you had said, he already had one foot out of the door. You should applaud him, you should celebrate, you should tell him he was lucky and he should tell you you were skilled, but in this moment all you could think to do was try to hold him as he slipped away beneath you into the world you didn't want to face yet. The war was nearly over and everyone knew it; it was only a matter of time before he would grow anxious to get home. You were clinging to him, and he was already gone. 

"I should hope not." he was shocked at his own earnesty, the way he didn't doubt it for a minute. He really did hope not. "Wouldn't want to rob you of all your fun, now would I?". Joking now, he let out a deep breath, and you reached over him to the bedside table to retrieve the roll of bandaging. 

"Oh I'd simply never forgive you." 

"Then let's just keep me forever. Tell 'em all I'm dying." he murmured into your ear as you returned to sitting in front of him, and you laughed a little at that. It was hard to hide a healthy man in the middle of a hospital, especially now that the hospital was quieter, nearly all of the tunnelling casualties long since gone away. You often wondered if Tommy should have been gone by now, and always very quickly regretted the thought. It stung you to your heart, staying there for a long time afterwards like a poisoned dart, try as you might to shake the thought. 

But now you were smiling and he was whispering into your ear and the thought was gone as soon as it had arrived inside your head, insidious as the creeping cold that was drawing into the early-October air. Now he was here, and his breath was warm down your neck and you wanted to wrap your arms around his neck and draw him in closer and taste the harsh hospital soap on his skin, and instead you drew away, looking at him tenderly and if there was a line then the two of you had crossed it a long time ago. 

"You were. And now, you're not." 

"You're my angel of life." he teased and yes, he knew deep down that there was no other word for it. You had taken him from the river half-dead, wishing to have done with the other half and cut ties entirely, praying to let go and run where no one could ever find him again, and now he was here and he knew that there was nothing he could say to you but those three words and he could never say that either. You had saved his life, but then again you saved his life again and again, with every morning that you walked into his ward. 

"Don't really think that that's a thing, sweetheart." you bit back a giggle at him and the silly smile that had tangled up your heartbeat deep inside your chest. 

"Didn't you just hear me say that you were it?" 

"That's... that's not how it works?" 

"You're an angel. My angel. Brought me back to life, didn't yer?" he cupped your cheeks in his large hands and stared up at you with those wide blue eyes that had you falling over yourself and blushing like an idiot. 

"Perhaps. But I think you're a lot more hardy than you let on. And a lot softer, too." you rested your hand over his, holding it to your cheeks and meeting his gaze. 

"Perhaps. But that's just for you to know, isn't it." and with that he leaned in closer to rest his forehead against yours, lips brushing and always an impossible universe apart. 

"Careful or I'll think I might be special." Please. Tell me how special I am, Tommy fucking Shelby. Tell me you adore me or I think I might explode. Tell me this is worth it. Tell me I'm not just imagining all of this. Tell me you feel it. Tell me, oh tell me, tell me you love me and I'll never ask for more. 

"Whoever told you that you weren't? Think I ought'ta pay someone a visit, eh?" 

"You wouldn't dare, Thomas Shelby." 

"Love it when you take control." when he chuckled you felt it hot against your lips and you wished you could shut him up here and now, with all the ward to watch as you did so. Their eyes, jealous probably of the beautiful man against your chest, burnt holes into your back and you sighed deeply. Much as you wanted to give in and say fuck it, you knew that this job had to take precedence. This was all you had, if they could see they'd fire you, and all this would be for nothing. It was the most important thing you knew that they could never never see you two. 

"And I love it when you shut up and let me work." you laughed weakly, extricating yourself from him and dipping your head to tie the bandages as you were meant to do. The crowd of nurses dispersed behind you, trickling back through the doors to the other wards were doubtless there would be another nurse to stare at. Their venom knew no bounds, their eyes no limits, and you were struck once more with the coldness and cruelty that seemed to follow you everywhere in this hellish place. 

"Didn't know I bugged you so much, love." he gasped as you tugged the bandage tighter, throwing out a hand to grip your hip and you prayed he couldn't feel your heart leap up into your throat. It didn't take a genius to see that he had you exactly where he wanted to, and he could see it in the dark scarlet blush on your face. You lowered your head, leaning back into him as the rest of the ward fell once more into an electric silence. 

"You bug my every waking thought, Tommy." you smiled, but what had been a sweet afterthought had somehow become something so much more sincere, and you weren't even sure if that was a mistake or another slip of the tongue as your heart spilled out in the spaces between the words. 

"Wouldn't want it any other way." he ran his fingertips over the side of your face, tracing your cheekbones and the tired skin beneath your eyes. For how can one sleep when all the sky is exploding in a glorious technicolour alive with the eyes of the boy asleep only walls along? "Like to know you love me." he traced your lips, and all the nerves were set alight in anticipation. It took all the strength within you to keep from melting into his hands. 

"Oh do I?" I'll follow you until all the stars have left the sky and walk beside you wherever you will have me, just tell me that I may and words will have no meaning in the world besides what I can sing to you to make you fall asleep beside me. Tell me I am yours and I will watch the world implode around us and I will never say a word because we are all we need and the world has never been so kind to me as the thought of you that rouses me each morning. Love me, love me, know that I love you. 

"Was hoping you did." he smiled, but his smile was faltering, and for a moment there was something in his eyes that scared you to no end, because here he was, and here you were, and Tommy Shelby the Unbreakable Man was fucking terrified. 

"I do, I do, you know I do." he reached up with his other hand to bring your lips to his and you pulled away, the footsteps clattering in the corridor a stark reminder that you could not stay. People were coming, and you knew they couldn't ever see you like this. "I need to go. Tommy, let me leave or I'll stay here forever and ever." you leapt up from the bed, Tommy almost falling forward as he tried to pull you back by the hand. You cupped his face, looking deep into his eyes one last time with a sad sigh. 

"Is that so bad?" he implored, his eyes pleading, a world away from the confident, controlled Tommy Shelby that you knew. He squeezed your hand in his, and you knew that it would be like losing yourself entirely to try and part your entwined souls. 

"Positively scandalous." you murmured hurriedly, and you could hear the nurses' voices echoing in the corridor, drawing ever closer as you hastened to move away, your heart breaking into a million places. 

"Call on me tomorrow." it wasn't a question, and it wasn't a command, just a statement of what the two of you and all the world could know. You would call on him tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, and forever and ever until there were no days and he was not here at all. You came every day, regular as the sun rising and the tides flowing and all those other forces of nature which could not love the time and the world quite so much as you loved him. 

"I wouldn't have it any other way." you whispered, for him to hear and him alone, then gathered up his bandages and ran off down the ward into the harsh white light of the nurses' chambers as the sound of the nurses and matrons filled the air behind you. 

________________________________________________________________________________

Alone in your chamber that night, you wept upon your window-sill, your tears dripping out of the window onto the branches of the sycamore trees below. Leaves already fallen to the ground, their skeletons stretched out before you in the graveyard of an orchard, and you know that somewhere below you, your tears would water the barren soils of some freshly-made grave. You wondered what life he had lead, you wondered had he loved, and what had come of love for him. You wondered if his heart had broken once or twice before it stopped entirely in this Barzakh of man, and you cried for him as he lay, already dead, far beneath the ground and the shifting sea of brown-black leaves that shone softly in the moonlight. 

There was a sort of ethereal beauty in the moonlight that made you wish that Tommy could stand and walk to you, and sit and watch beside you. Unspeaking, unthinking, unfeeling, just the silence of the darkness and the knowledge that he was here, and you thought that that might be all you ever needed in this world and the next - the knowledge that he was here beside you, and that he was not going anywhere. 

You fell asleep sitting on the windowsill, your arms wrapped around your knees as you huddled up against the cold, and as with every night that came before and every night that would ever leave you cold again, your last thought was of him. 

________________________________________________________________________________

But you couldn't see him the next morning. On waking, you were met with the cursory glance of the matron, and the news which sent you almost falling to your knees. It was almost an hour after breakfast that you could finally bring yourself to make the rounds of the wards, and to find your way as always back to his bed in a hurricane of grief and fear. 

"Took your time. Almost thought you were gonna leave me here, all on my own." he smirked, and you could have cried at that. 

"Could I ever? Brought you a little something, by way of an apology." you dug around in his pockets and brought out a small, crumpled paper bag, and in it the sticky barley sugars that you had been hiding in your spare pillow case since you had bought them for him three days before, waiting for the time to give them to him but now there was no time and you both could see that something was horribly wrong. 

He made to protest and you pressed the bag into his hands insistently, wringing your hands awkwardly as you tried not to meet his gaze, sure that if you did you would start crying and never be able to stop. Seeing the emotion that was playing upon your face, he unwrapped a barley sugar and, cupping your jaw in one hand, brought it up to your open mouth and placed it on the tip of your tongue delicately, pressing your mouth shut as the overly-sugary taste exploded over your tongue, sickeningly sweet and yet another reminder that none of this could last. On your lips the taste of the sweet was already turning sour, as the bliss of these last months were already beginning to give away to the worry that was pooling in your stomach, worry that things would never be quite so good as this, that now was the last of all the best days and all the months that would follow would only leave you colder still, and lonelier for want of his bright light. 

"Something wrong?" he brought your hand up to his lips, kissing it lightly and pulling you down to sit beside him on the bed. At that, your walls broke down entirely, and you slumped against his chest, your face burying into your hands. "Hey, angel, what's goin' on?" he sounded genuinely panicked, and it only hurt all the more. 

"Tommy they're - you're-" it was all you could do to not cry, and the words stuck in your throat like a hundred barley sugars were clogging up the air within your lungs and stopping you from breathing. How could you breathe when you were away from him? You prayed that you wouldn't have to find out, and your prayers were met with the icy silence of the early February morning. 

"Shh, love take your time. 'M not goin' anywhere." he soothed, rocking you slightly against him and rubbing circles on your back with his great, trembling hands, and you clutched him to you with fistfuls of his stiff white nightshirt. 

"But you- you are. They told me to tell you." you wiped your eyes with one hand and looked up at him through the tears which were already forming again in an endless torrent that spilled down your cheeks, and smiled. "You're better." 

"That's... that's wonderful." he shook his head in disbelief, grinning, and pressing a kiss to your forehead and staying there, close to you, but his face fell as he turned to look at you again, met with the overwhelming sadness on your face. 

"You're going home." you murmured, closing your eyes so he couldn't see the surge of emotion that was crushing your heart, and breathing in the sweet soapy smell of his skin as though in this one moment you could paint him into your mind for the rest of your hopeless eternity alone. 

"Oh." his voice was flat and sad, and you wondered if you'd broken him at last, and he looked away from you, turning his head up to the high hospital ceiling, raining curses at some god he'd never known till this moment, blinking back the tears he would do anything to keep from you. 

"Tommy, promise me- promise me you'll write, okay?" your voice was feeble, pathetically so, and it dipped and broke as your heart stopped and started again with every broken breath rattled out of your lungs. 

"I'll write everyday if it meant I could hear a single word from you." he whispered, running his shaky fingers through your hair and breathing in the sweet scent of your perfume and the chamomile soap that they made in the little pharmacist's down the street that you had told him about. 

"I need to go and- and sort out your papers, else you'll never be able to go." you joked, but the laugh that followed it up came out more as a strangled cry, a breathless scream into the darkness that he was bound to leave behind him as he went away "Tommy, promise me." 

"I promise. I promise." how was he supposed to leave you when all his life had been grey until now, until the glorious watercolour can bleeding in through the canvas structures he had built his life upon. How was he supposed to leave you now, knowing that nothing would ever be quite as good as they were when you were here, nor quite so kind as in those early mornings when it was just you and him alone and he could swear that your punishing God had turned his face away. 

"I l- I love- I-" but somewhere between the tears and the time that stretched before you when he would not be here, the words caught and tangled as you tried to push them out, and you wanted to scream in helpless frustration but your voice had wasted away to a hoarse whisper, thick with sadness. 

"Shh, you don't need to. I know... I know." he pulled you in ever closer, resting his chin on the top of your head and closing his eyes against the tears that pressed against the backs of his eyes. And yes, he knew, because how could you not? After everything, after every night you'd sat up in the chair beside his bed, when you thought he couldn't see you but he could, he could every time, and he loved you a little more for every time he saw you there. How could you not love him, for all those times he'd held you a little too close and thought maybe you would push away but you never did and there was nothing in his life that made him feel quite so clean, quite so forgiven, as that he could touch you and have you not flinch, look at you and you never look away, never tell him he was wrong, never see the monster he was no more, he prayed he was no more because you could never love a monster and how could you not love him? 

When at last he pulled away to kiss you softly on the forehead you were still and quiet, your breaths ragged and uneven, slipping through slightly-parted lips, and he knew that you had been asleep for quite some time. Laying you down on the bed and moving to stand shakily, your hand, still gripping his shirt, clenched and pulled him back again, and he laughed bitterly into the silence of the ward, softly so not to wake you as he lay back against you. 

He couldn't sleep - how could he when the hours were stealing away beneath and him and soon he would have to leave. How was he supposed to find you when you were half a world away and slipping farther, and how could he not try? He knew that, futile as he already knew all his plans would be, for nothing ever seemed to work out to plan for Tommy Shelby, he would search the world for you, he would give the world just to find you again in some happier time, to make you his when all he was was not a lonely little man in a hospital bed somewhere he didn't belong at all. He would find you, he would find you, there was no other way. 

________________________________________________________________________________

You walked him to the train station early the next morning, in the cold light of a purplish dawn that you had watched oncoming all night, sitting awake on the windowsill of your chamber where you could be first to see the cruel sun awaken in the east. As if in those few moments where it was just you and whatever God there may be out there you could push the sun back down to rest, cry for one more day and have your prayers be answered like no one else's had been in the grim wasteland of these godless years. 

The walk was short - too short, you barely had time to say goodbye, much less to let him know that he was and always would be the first thought you had when you woke up and the last before you fell asleep, the final dream of your fevered soul and the only truth you had ever known for sure. But as it was it was just as well, for you only had half an hour's leave from the hospital. The hospital, damn the hospital, and damn the whole bloody war with it. That men were born to fight and die was the cruellest fate you could imagine, and yet somehow in all this hatred you had caught a glimpse, if only for a moment as the world around you burned, of what you couldn't call by another name because it was the truest of things - that you had found there love, or something of that kind. 

You could hardly remember a word that he said on the way there, and it would not have made much difference if you could, for he was desperate to say something, anything, to fill the silence that had come between you as you slept, unguarded, in his arms. He had not slept, but lay and felt your chest rising and falling against his own, hours that seemed a short eternity and he missed every one he wasted thinking about you when he would soon be gone for good. 

And now there was no putting it off any longer - the train was drawing in in a wheezing cloud of smoke that wrapped around you and bound your very souls together, and you stepped in closer to clasp his hands in yours, scanning his impossibly blue eyes for some kind of sign that he could hear your silent prayer, that he would not leave you here. It was as though all the world you knew was going with you, and you had no idea where to start picking up the pieces to begin again anew. 

"I suppose this is where we say goodbye, isn't it." you coughed awkwardly, breaking the silence and shifting from foot to foot as you broke your gaze and looked away over his shoulder, up at the sky, across to the run-down platform cafe, anywhere but at him. 

"Don't say that. There are going to be a whole lot more chances to say goodbye to me yet, love, you just gotta find me first." he stroked your cheeks, smiling weakly and looking all the world but happy to go. 

"Tommy, don't-" you dropped your head down to memorise every button, every smudge and stitch and crease in his smart new uniform, a leaving gift from the hospital that you had no doubt was straight off a dead body, the blood barely cleaned of it before it was relabelled and shipped off somewhere else. At least he was alive, you thought, and as long as he was alive you would search for him forever. Still it was strange to see him in uniform, and in the upper pocket you caught the subtle gleam of sunlight on the pocket-watch you had bought for him in some happier time that seemed a lifetime from now. This was how all the best fairytales ended, and so much the better for it. 

"I'm serious. I mean it, I mean it, you know I mean it. I'm going to find you." he whispered, kissing your forehead and holding you to him. 

"I wouldn't have it any other way. Hurry though. I don't know how much of this I can take without you." you were desperate, begging and bargaining over sand grains in an hourglass, and you knew that all his words would come to nothing because there was nothing he could say that would stop the flow of heartless fate. You had read to him sometimes, in those endless rainy days when there was nothing to do but sit around and think of death and beautiful symmetry of all untimely things. 

"Days, it'll be days. I'll have you beside me sooner than you know." he looked up at the last few people making their way onto the train, knowing that any minute now he would have to pull away. You caught him looking, and followed his line of sight with a shaky sigh. So this was how it ended, this crazy whirlwind love affair that wasn't even that, just two sorry, broken fools who had somehow become something so much more than human. 

"Go." you forced it out, the word sticking in your mouth and burning through your every vein like poison in your bloodstream, "I'll be here when you're back. I'll be here forever." 

You held his hand as he gave the ticket to the train warden, letting go and turning away to gasp through the tears that choked you, blurred your vision. 

"(Y/N)!" he called from behind you, and you spun quickly, searching wildly for his face among the crowds of young men packed into the train car. He waved, pushing his way to the window and opening it so that he stood face to face with you, you on the platform and he on the train and the people in the train and on the platform standing kissing and crying and you thought you might be crying and you knew you should be kissing him and god did you just want to kiss him because you might never have the chance again. 

So you reached out to run a finger down the sharp line of his jaw, closing your eyes and leaning in until at last you felt the soft pressure as your lips met his. You thought perhaps it might have made it all go away - the war and the hospital and the dreadful thought that he would soon be gone forever - but all it did was make it all okay, and in a way it was all so much worse. You would be okay because he was here, but what would you do when he was gone, and you pulled him closer, kissed him harder, sucking the life from his lifeless lungs, pulling the darkness from his soul and cleansing by your love the bleakness in his mind. All things in mind, it probably wasn't the best kiss he'd ever had. All tear-stained cheeks and teeth colliding, the taste of cigarettes and toffee pennies and rhubarb and custard drops on his lips as he held you against him across the sharp line of the train window that cut into your ribs. You could feel the smoke from the train burning into your lungs, the shrill scream of the whistle carrying him away, and the wheels whirring as the train made to start away. 

With a sharp jolt it lurched forwards and you pulled away quickly, lips missing the sanctity of his sweet kisses, you kissed him once more, and again as the train began to move, stood away to watch him go then began to run after him, chasing the train car as it swept away along the platform with the broken memories of the winter passed and unreturning. 

"Tommy!" you screamed, and he leaned out of the window, watching you as you sprinted wildly on and on in the vain and hopeless prayer for one last glimpse of that beauty you feared that you would miss forever. And beside you the train cars swept away. And sooner still you reached the end, and the platform was no before you, falling away beneath your feet and sending you reeling back to keep your balance as you knew that you could go no further. Falling forward to your knees in sobs that shook you now that he was not here to hold you up this time, you forced yourself to glance up through the hazy mist of tears as, already in the distance far beneath the bridge, the train wound out of sight.


	3. Blinded By Your Light - Part 3. On Changing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it's peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.

When you could stand again, you stood and bought yourself a cup of coffee in the town square. Sitting in the mid-morning sunlight, smoothing down your uniform and watching the children playing football and laughing, you tried to convince yourself that this would be the end of things. In the clearer light it was easier for you to imagine that his face was already fading from your mind, becoming steadily little more than one of the faded posters on the boulangerie wall, yet another reminder of the past quickly disappearing into the morning air. By the time you'd finished your coffee it would have gone entirely. 

Or so you tried so hard to believe. 

Yet despite all this - despite the surprising warmth of the morning as you took a walk along the banks of the river, despite the flowers blooming beside the river that you picked and arranged in a little bouquet to lay upon your windowsill when you got back to the hospital, despite the way the sunlight looked upon the water and the way you could swear the face you saw staring up at you was anything but your own - the hospital when you returned to it seemed colder and lonelier than ever before, the empty shell that seemed all at once too small to hold you and large enough to drown you into its tall white walls and empty corridors that led nowhere at all now. He was not waiting for you at the end of those corridors. Nothing was waiting for you at the end of those corridors. 

You tried to get back to work as normal, but even you could see that something had changed, and things could never be as good as they were before. Every morning was a little colder inside, even though the sun burst brighter and the flowers painted your windowsill red and pink and glorious yellow when you woke, still the days were longer and you went to sleep a little lonelier than when you woke up that morning. It was becoming increasingly clear that there was nothing to keep you here now that he was gone, and you hated it. 

You hated the way you still saw him when you walked into the west ward to change the sheets of the last few patients, spending longer and longer in your chamber, waiting listlessly for orders that never came because there was no one here anymore. The war was over; you had won, so why did it all feel so tragic? 

And so it was not long before you handed in your notice, taking those last four lonely weeks to wander around the grounds aimlessly, taking in the trees in bloom, the birds that wheeled overhead at dawn when every night you could not sleep for wanting to leave so badly. You'd never seen it all before, all the colours of the sky when the long nights were finally over and the endless days began again as though they never left. Four weeks was all it took, to stand by his bed more than you would like to admit, trying to conjure him back up as he whirled through your mind like the happiest thought that you would never have again. The taste of his lips as he left you, the way he laughed and the sight of him watching as you walked up the hospital aisle every morning, regular as the sun and you loved him a little more every day. 

When those four weeks were over at last you packed your bags and left for good, casting one last glance over your shoulder as you resigned those last memories to peace as he cast no letters across that boundless ocean to you. Almost a month, and not a word had come your way. A smarter girl than you might have been over him by now. And as the train carried you out of the station and the nowhere town you left behind, you wondered if the view had been so sweet to him. 

________________________________________________________________________________

Quitting medical school had been the easy part. Stepping off the train in Kent, it only took a matter of days before you had had enough of the quaint little villages, so much like the lonely town now far into your past, with their thatched roofs and old boarding schools. Soon enough you were on another train, this time further North, watching the forests of bluebells slipping past out of the train window, becoming grayer, flatter, towns where there was no sun at all as you came closer and closer to where you knew you must now go. 

And late that night you were there at last, leaving the station and making your way down the familiar backstreets to the church as you took in once again the dark and dirty streets and drab buildings. The town you knew better than any - Birmingham. 

It had been a shock at first - even to you, long away as you might have been, the change was brutally clear and unnerving. Outside the station the buildings were faded now, hung with washing dripping red water thick with the traces of blood onto the street, and you could see the marks of bullets on the walls and drainpipes, shots missed in fights there rarely were before. The city was a shadowy reminder that all the world had changed a little for the worse. 

"Ma'am?" 

You were shaken out of your dark thoughts by the sudden voice of a station steward, a young boy with deep worry-lines on his face that made you wonder what he'd seen that you could not even imagine. It wasn't good for young boys to look so old. You smiled down at his briefly, and he gestured to the heavy suitcase you were carrying. 

"Sure y'got the right stop?" he sounded genuinely surprised, and even before when there was trouble in the streets you had never heard that telltale strain of concern in his voice. It struck you like a slap to the face - he was afraid for you. You felt like you were walking into hell itself. 

"Yeah, quite sure. This is Birmingham, right?" you joked tensely, forcing a reassuring smile but he seemed not to register or not to find it amusing as he frowned at you calculatingly, trying to figure something out about you. You tried not to shrink under his gaze, unused to such unusual behaviour and trying to remember something about this from before. Had it really been so cold here before? You couldn't remember being so uneasy. 

" 'Fraid so. Y'got anywhere to stay?" he stood beside you, facing the street, but you could see him sneak a glance at you out of the corner of his eye as he said it, as if waiting for your answer with a great deal of interest. Concern. You convinced yourself that you were not unnerved. 

"Yeah, I... the church." The words slipped out before you could stop them, the hasty plan concocted on the train even as it was nearing the station. You thought perhaps you had known all along what you had to do, still it seemed unreal to say it out loud, like trying to talk about a dream and having it come out as empty words and the promise of it being greater, grander in your mind when it was yours to live alone. There was some darkness, some curious depth in those simple words that made you wonder if there were some untold fate yet hanging in the stars for you, the promise or the warning of some unseen path stretching before you as you left the train and began again somewhere new. This was only the beginning of things. "My father is the priest." 

"Ah." he grunted, nodding and you wondered if it had eased his mind or burdened it. You hadn't been home in so long that you doubted he even remembered you as he pretended to. He couldn't have been more than sixteen, still just a child and working already late into the night. "Two lefts and a right down the back alley." he pointed away and you bristled, his patronising tone getting on your nerves. 

"Yes, I know where the church is!" you snapped, exhausted from the journey and exasperated. You couldn't wait to get out of the cold and put down your bags in your childhood room, get some sleep and find it all brighter and friendlier than tomorrow, the Birmingham you remembered instead of the harsh city you somehow seemed to have fallen into in its place. 

"Right, right. Meant no harm, just that yer" at this he scratched his head pensively, trying to find the right words to say, "just don't look like yer the sorts that's from round here, s'all." he looked you over once again, and this time you rolled your eyes and, picking up the suitcase barely filled with all that had been your life for the past years, set off down the street. 

It was only late afternoon, still you had missed the sunset and found yourself now in the midst of a hazy evening gloom, blueish and thick with smoke and the smell of rain in the distance, threatening and homely and a million other things that you couldn't quite find words for. The streets around you were no warmer than you had feared, the windows shut up against the cold and barred for good measure, doors locked and padlocked. The whole city resplendent in its grime and fear and darkness, and you could taste the foreboding like a sore upon your tongue, soiling those chapped lips where once his kisses gave you the truth you had so long been seeking, and once took it away. You found yourself hurrying slightly as you walked down empty streets where you could have sworn there had been life, been light, before. Shivering a little against the icy cold, you could not help your mind straying back to the sunny mornings in the hospital where you had been so sure that summer would come earlier, bring lighter days and brighter hearts but here the cold wold last forever. 

And, turning a sharp bend in the street, there it loomed before you - the tall brick walls of the church, single spire pointing up into the starless sky in vindication of some god turned away from this personal hell of a city. You reached around in your pockets for the keys from a lifetime before. In case you ever came back, and here you were before the tall doors, looking on at what you were beginning to fear was a very bad decision. You should not have come back here; you should have stayed away while there was still memory enough to convince you that this city was more than just this mass of shut-up shops and bullet-marks and stories behind every brick and cobblestone that seemed more blood than words to tell. 

With that thought still burning in your mind, you unlocked the doors and pushed them open with no small effort, shuddering at the loud groan as they jolted open. Before you the church was dark as night, a single candle at the altar the only sign that here was life at all. You thought you could remember a time when the nights were alive with candlelight, warm and welcoming as though here was some heaven sent down to you in that time when you could still be forgiven. There was no forgiveness here, only the cruel reminder that if there was a better place this was not it, and you doubted you could ever reach it at all. The war was over, and for the first time in your life you had sins enough to atone forever. 

You stopped in front of the altar for a moment, looking up at Christ on his cross in the faint glow of the candlelight, shadows like ropes upon his wrists and playing upon his face, and through the half-light you could make out those disappointed eyes staring down at you, distant on his sad height. Once, when you were so much younger, you had asked your father why he looked so sad. Your father told you he was dying, that he loved the world and so he had to die for it. You hadn't understood and he had told you that sometimes when you love something you have to let it go, and let yourself be hurt by it to let you know you really love it. There are somethings you can't not love, no matter how many times they let you down. You thought perhaps you never understood that until now. You took a tea-candle from the rack beside the altar, lighting one carefully and setting it beneath the cross with a quick prayer under your breath and a last glance up at the messiah in his glorious death before your eyes. 

You picked up your suitcase again and went on to the door in the back wall of the church, half-concealed behind a thick purple curtain. Taking a deep, shaky breath, you lifted a hand and knocked once, twice, upon the worn wood. A minute or so passed and you considered knocking again when, from somewhere in the backrooms behind the door, there came the sound of heavy footsteps, and promptly a low sound as of the tapping of the door, followed by the clicking of several locks. A compartment in the top of the door slid open, a small opening appearing through which you could see a flash of white hair. 

"Who is it." 

Your father's voice, but old and tired and with a strain that was more of guilt than of age, so changed it took you a moment to recognise the man you knew behind the door. 

"(Y/N)." you murmured, biting your lip to keep from bursting out with emotion at the tired man who came suddenly into view through the window. He looked up at you then, and his eyes met yours, clouded and white and unseeing entirely. 

"(Y/N)." he repeated softly, more to himself than to you, reaching up to rub his blind eyes with a trembling hand. "(Y/N)." he shook his head and smiled sadly, and for a moment you wondered if he would turn you away, for even in the blurred white of those eyes you could not miss the shadow that passed across his features, as though he wished you anywhere but here. 

Then the shadow passed, and he reached out for the door again. You heard another lock break open, then one more, then the door whined as it opened out. You had not remembered there being so many locks there before. You could not remember there being any there at all. Why would you need locks in a church? You squeezed through the low doorway, bursting out into the small anteroom beyond. There, upon the old kitchen table, were laid out the remnants of a meagre dinner, one place setting and a half-filled glass of whiskey. You couldn't remember your father drinking. You tried to ignore the sound of the locks clicking back into place behind you, the way your father checked them anxiously to make sure they held. You tried not to wonder what he was keeping out. 

"Didn't expect yer." he muttered, wheezing a little as he felt for his chair and sat heavily. 

"Sorry. Didn't expect to be back. Just sort of happened." it wasn't entirely a lie. You had thought for some time that maybe you should go home, try to start again like you did when you were small. You had thought perhaps that here, where everything had been so easy and free, you could set things right, forget about your winter in Flanders and leave the past to rest. It was only as you were on the train, heading further and further from Kent with every passing second, that you knew that, conscious decision or not, you were on your way to Birmingham. It had seemed almost that fate had a plan laid out for you, though you did not know what it was. 

"Glad yer back. Been... different without you. Wish things were better 'ere for yer." his eyes wandered around the room, then snapped back to you as his expression grew more stern and wistful. 

"What'd'ya mean?" you smiled at your own accent coming back a little. The longer you stayed here the stronger it became, and it always amused you to hear it slipping through when you least expected it. The american patients at the hospital had used to like the clipped Kentish voice you had got used to using, and you had always laughed at that. If they only knew what you Brits were really like, you bet they wouldn't be quite so impressed. 

"Ain't exactly how you left it, thought y'would have seen it by now." he reached for his glass and you pushed it into his hands. He grunted a thank-you and took a long, slow sip of his whiskey. Finishing the glass, he set it down and stared off into the distance with a drawn-out sigh. "It's getting worse out there. People are dying, and there ain't nothing God's got to do about it. 'S evil. 'S getting more and more evil." 

You shivered involuntarily at his words, and at the late-March chill that had crept in without you noticing, tugging your thin cardigan closer around you. All of a sudden you wished you hadn't come here. The cold, the darkness, the streets with their laundry soaked through with more blood than water, there was something about it that made you want nothing more than to run away like you did all those years before. 

"Is my room still here?" 

"Course. Didn't know if you'd want it when y'came back." When you came back. He had been waiting for you, knowing you'd come back eventually. No one ever left here, and you were no exception. This grim, grey city had an unusual way of pulling you back in every time you ran away, reaching out with shadowy fingertips to snatch away whatever daydream of a life you had built before you. "Go on. I'll be a little longer." 

You went to the stairs, looking back over the bannister and through the hallway doorway to see him sitting alone in the kitchen, staring off into space, his expression a murky mess of turmoil and troubled conflict. Even after so long you could still read him like a book. From a distance he looked so small, a tiny figure hunched over in gowns that were too big for him. The same gowns he used to command a room in, stately and tall. The years had changed more than just you. 

"Dad." 

He lifted his head in the direction of your voice, blinking as you tried to find something to say to let him know that you had not missed him, but that you loved him so much in that moment that you thought perhaps if you would leave again now you'd miss him this time around. 

"It's not so bad.” 

You smiled weakly and went upstairs.


	4. Blinded By Your Light - Part 4. On Losing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it's peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.

It took you a moment when you woke up to remember where you were and, for a blissful moment, who you were too. There were days when you thought that, waking up early in the morning before the sun had risen, you could be anyone that came to mind and the world would not change at all. All would be so still in just one moment that you could almost convince yourself that you were, as you so often did as a child, emerging from the final pages of some thick and absorbing book and finding yourself once more in the curious light of a reality that was somewhat stranger than the world you had left behind. As you sat up in your narrow childhood bed it was tempting to believe that all of this had been some fanciful imagination of your tempestuous mind, a dream for want of a better word with which to give such heart-wrenching fairytales justice. 

But then your eyes landed on the pile of rumpled clothes dumped upon the chair, and the reality came flooding back as though that unbreakable wall you had put up in your mind had finally broken. All that hurt and all that tragic backstory was real, was yours, and before you there was only... what? Nothing? You realised, slumping back against the pillows, that for the first time in your life you had absolutely no idea what you were going to do. It was easy to say so many times before that you just had to know where you wanted to go and do whatever it took to get there, but what did you do when you didn't even know where you wanted to go? 

Medicine was a no-go. You thought it quite probable that if you saw another undressed wound or bedpan you would set fire to your apron and quite possibly a couple of hospital sheets too. Not to mention the images that still haunted your darkest dreams each night, burnt into the backs of your eyes so that you feared none of these long nights would ever get you clean. Those long, dark nights, when you could almost see your soul itself in the raw redness of the skin you scrubbed clean, washing away the taste of the hospital and the scream of the train whistle in your ears and the itch of blood upon your skin and upon your soul and dripping down the walls all around. You thought it might be time to repent for all that, try to find some way you could help people for real this time, the deep shit, not just sitting and smiling and pretending you'd done them a favour by saving their lives. 

So it was with a heavy heart that you left the house that morning, setting out a plate of breakfast before your father, asleep in his chair and you thought he probably had not moved since the night before, unseeing eyes watching the locked door. You patted his hand gently, rowsing him and then making to move away as you saw his eyes scrunch up and then open.

"Hmm?" 

"(Y/N)." you reminded him, smiling feebly before remembering that he could not see you. That hurt a little, you had to admit, and you snatched the ring of keys briskly off the tabletop to begin the laborious task of unlocking the door, blinking to push back the emotions pressing against your eyes in the terrible threat of tears, when you heard him stir and clear his throat behind you. 

"Yer out early, eh?" a note of concern, of fatherhood in his voice that surprised both of you. You smiled wider, more truthfully this time, and he coughed awkwardly. You wondered how long it had been since he had had a daughter. You wondered how long it had been since you had had a father. Your smile dropped. You tried not to think about it any more. 

"Gotta find a job, 'en't I?" 

"If yer want t', I s'pose." 

"Was sort of hoping you could give me a word. Where to go, y'know?" 

"Heard Larry from the butcher's hiring." you shivered at the thought of all that blood, the images flashing through your head like dreadful fireworks, visceral and garish in their bright shots of red and stark white. You shook the thoughts away. Somehow he must have noticed - somehow he always knew - because he went on quickly, in a strained voice, "post office is always hiring. Should be nice." There was a heavy tension in the room that neither of you could quite find your way around, the sound of secrets left unsaid as both of you looked on at the person you had known your whole life and suddenly knew nothing at all about. There were a million things you wished you knew, and every one you knew you never would. 

"Yeah. Sure." you murmured noncommittally, breaking open the last of the locks and slipping through the doorway, into the austere iciness of the unlit church. You went to push aside the curtain, then stopped and took a breath, eyes closed. 

You thought you could taste it rich upon your tongue, the memory of incense clouding your senses as you dream you can make out the faces turning to watch you tumble though the curtain and down the steps, six years old again and dressed in your favourite blue dress for church, Isaiah Jesus crashing through behind you. Or twelve years old, and kissing him over and over behind this curtain where the shadows play like angels' fingers upon the wall and every breath is another secret and you've never had secrets before. Or, the sweetest sadness you had yet to know, eighteen years old and untangling your suitcase from the swathes of thick purple fabric caught up in the wheels, as your mother grabbed at your wrist and your father stood on by the altar, stony silence like the tomb. You hadn't seen the church alight since then. 

You hadn't seen the sunlight pouring through the stained glass windows, shattering upon the cool floor beneath the altar, the way the churchgoers hunched and shivered in their seats because it was always cold here, nor heard the deep cry of the old organ in the corner. You had learned that once. You thought you must have forgotten it, because now you were sure that no note would come out right. It seemed almost blasphemous, coming back and expecting it all to be the same as that dreadful moment when you left it, afraid and so alone because that was how you liked to be back then. Those dark Sundays under the watchful eyes of God, the one thing that, in this little city of odds and ends, made you all feel whole. 

Still you ached, pined, for the way their faces turned to you one by one as you made your way down the aisles to sit at your pew at the back of the church in your pretty Sunday dresses. Still trying to rewrite a memory over that last morning when all the world had fallen apart, running down the aisle with your bags spilling clothes like tears and promises behind you, tears and promises that haunted you still, behind you and around you the way they were the day you left, and all the days you didn't come back. The awful way they looked at you, your mother quick behind you and pulling at the hem of the warmest coat you found, the stained glass windows as they painted the hot tears on your cheeks. And the worst thought, that if you had the chance to do it again you knew you always would. 

You breathed out. 

Opening your eyes to the small space behind the curtain, you tugged it aside and slipped through into the church. No beam of light upon the altars, and the stained glass windows were thick with dust, you stood in the shadows near to the centre of the church, looking on in the muddy half-light at the way the pews stood empty, a single old woman hunched over her clasped hands and you wished you could pry them apart, put between them a penny and tell her she was better now and on her way, for you would find no God here. There had been no God here for so very long. 

She did not look up as you passed, the only sign that she was here at all the breathy whisper that spilled into the silence of the early morning, wrapping around you and you breathed it in like smoke unto your dying lungs, the taste of faith you didn't have and the quiet kindness that came with a fate you did not know yet and looming before you, ominous as the grave. The candles were pitiful and small, and you didn't want to light one now, in the unforgiving glare of daylight. For who to light a candle to - to your father alone in his backroom and when he would step out into the church and find no one left to hear him as he ran out of words to speak, to your mother long since dead and gone and you not there to wish her well as she slipped away into the night, to him as your mind lulled with the quiet memory of the train pulling away, his necklace still heavy at your neck like a second heart upon your chest where it hung no longer because you were older now, and two hearts was two too many. Or maybe for yourself, for the self you lost in the ruinous war and the self you found when you returned. The self you didn't recognise, and the self you remembered, and you weren't quite sure which of them you hated more. 

The cold creeping up the ridge of your spine like the icy hands of fate upon your troubled mind, you hurried out of the steps, wincing at the loud ringing of your footsteps upon the tiled floor. Standing in the cold outside, you reached around in your pocket for a cigarette, lighting it with shaky hands and bringing it up to your lips. Taking a long drag on it, you let yourself relax a little, sighing deeply and running your free hand through your hair. The sound of the city you loved so much was muted to a silence, not the silence of sleeping in through the early morning but the silence of the tomb, the unnerving quiet that made you sure that somewhere in this labyrinth of sins there was a man with blood upon his hands and a mind that was too loud. This was a silence you blew your brains out to, or someone else's if you were sicker still. The busy bustle of Sundays at the market, people on their way into the church and the bells, the bells, the way they sang unto the sky and all the gods you did not know, and now only the silence, the absence of your god and the absence of a sky in which to hold you down. You were limitless, and it was terrifying. 

From somewhere in the distance you could hear the postman whistling as he made his rounds as he did every morning since forever, regular as the jumbled ticking of the faulty kitchen clock that had kept you up all night with its blissful certainty of an eternity this way. The sun emerged from behind a deep grey cloud, and for a glorious instant there was an explosion of pale golden light upon the street-corner, bathing you in its soft glow as you dropped your cigarette to the pavement that was more dirt than cobblestone, crushing it with the heel of your shoe. Beginning down the street-corner, you took in each brick and stone and tile and window pane as you grew ever closer to the main street. Looking up to the sky, your eyes caught at one point the face of a young child staring down upon you from a second-floor window. You smiled up at him warmly, but his face remained impassive, hard and utterly emotionless, and a moment later the tall, broad figure of his mother appeared behind him, wrapping an arm around him and bringing him away from the window. Your smile faltered and dropped, your expression clouding over as you pulled your coat tighter and began to walk a little faster. 

After a couple of minutes of walking in silence your mind began to wander, and you realised that you were finding the right direction almost without thinking, your feet guiding you along the streets like you had never left. With every building a new memory, like the time you and Isaiah Jesus stole a newspaper from the stand outside the newsagents and used it to make a nest for a baby bird you had found down by the cut, or all those winter days when you would drag your mother down to the pawn shop on the richer side of town and look into the windows of the jewellery shops at the Christmas displays, diamonds and sapphires and a million colours of brilliant jewels sparkling in the fairy lights in the window. The days when it snowed you would run to the bakery and ask your aunt and uncle at the counter for a tray to sledge down the steeper streets with your friends. Your aunt and uncle... you wondered how they were now. You were nearly at the bakery, looking out on either side at the familiar shopfronts with their bright signs and cheery notices, only now a little colder, a little less familiar. It was as though seen in some daydream, half-asleep and only partly in control of where your frenzied mind may lead you, and looking on at the world constructed in your mind, too close to real for comfort and yet a world away, changed and disquieting. 

You stood for a moment by the door to the bakery, outside looking in. The same rows upon rows of fresh-baked bread, the same colourful tartlets and the sweet pastries you used to pocket every time you visited. You thought they must have known, but you supposed they didn't mind too much. That was back when this city was a family. Something made you wonder if they'd still be so kind these days. 

The bell above the door jangled as you opened it, smoothing down your hair and smiling expectantly as you waited for the familiar sound of your aunt and uncles voice coming from the backroom. And for a moment there was nothing; you moved to stand in front of the counter, shifting from foot to foot impatiently and holding your breath. This was the most difficult part - not the leaving but the coming back, and having to explain why you left at all. 

"Coming," you caught the faint sound of your aunt's voice from the backroom, weary and low, and you opened your mouth to speak, closed it again when no words came to mind. They would come in their own time. Through the doorway, the large shadow stepped forward, your breath catching as you saw, as if for the first time ever, your aunt. She was smaller than you had expected, the bags under her eyes a deep and sickly purplish-blue and her hair thinner and greyer, pulled back behind her face in a tight. That kind sparkle in her eyes that had drawn you in day after day to talk to her and your uncle was gone, and in its place there was a haunted gleam that seemed to dull her impossibly. She looked tired, as she never had before. 

"(Y/N)..." she smiled weakly, opening her floury arms and you rushed into them. And when she held you it was like you never left at all, like you were small and happy like you used to be, and she was big and kind. Like this last near-decade was left behind you at the door, discarded like a heavy winter coat when summer came at last, and all there was was how things were before. 

"God I've missed you." you laughed pathetically into her chest, grinning up at her, but there was something in her eyes that made you hesitate for just a moment, a warning and an apology like she had something else to say and didn't quite know how to say it, or maybe didn't want to. 

"Y'know, me too, love." she brushed your hair away from your face gently, and if you closed your eyes tight enough you could almost pretend it was not her at all, but the mother you had come back to find and had come back too late. Like you could forget a million things, letters and telegraphs and late nights spent weeping into a pillow in the darkness of your chamber a hundred thousand miles from here and have her back as she was meant to be. You wished... you wished. 

"How- how are things?" your words bubbled out, tripping over your tongue as you tried your hardest not to sound worried. There was something hot and cruel, deep in the pit of your stomach, that whispered to you that something was terribly wrong, though you knew not what, and itched to find out. You thought you probably didn't want to know. 

"Good... Good." her answer was purposefully vague, and you could not help but notice that she would not meet your eyes. Her gaze darted from the counter to the doorway to the shopfront to the posters upon the wall. 

"The bakery?" 

"Oh y'know, business as usual." she smiled at you reassuringly, and you knew she was trying to comfort you, to take your mind off something that was decidedly crueller and much much worse, still your stomach was steadily filling up with dread. This pretty picture was falling apart, and there was something missing from it. 

"Where's... where's Uncle George?" your voice had dropped to a shaky whisper, tears pressing against the backs of your eyes as you searched her eyes desperately for some kind of sign that you were wrong. You had to be. 

"(Y/N)..." she began, steadying you and steeling herself as she readied herself to talk about it just one more time, and you could see the pain in her eyes, anger enough to turn against the face of God and rain down hell upon the love he had not shown. 

"No... did I miss him? Thought I'd just come by, see how things were." tears choked your throat and you gasped for breath, drowning in the heavy silence as you held onto her apron in tight fists. You shook your head, babbling under your breath and she tried to hold your cheek but you jerked your head away, staring wildly at her with teary eyes. "I'll go, I'll go, I'll come back when- when he's back. Tell me when he's in and I'll try to- try- try to drop by, o-okay?" but by the end your voice had trailed off into a sob, a whine that pierced the unearthly silence of the bakery, empty safe for the two of you standing at the centre of the storm, clinging to each other as if this wasn't somehow the worst of times and the worst yet to come. 

"(Y/N), please. Please." she bunched up her fists in your hair, collapsing into you and you wondered how she'd managed without you and then, more scarily, if she had managed at all. If all you were holding was love and dust and ashes, were you ever made to last? "Listen to me, sweetheart- shhh, s'okay, don't cry. 'm right here. 'm always right here," you sobbed into her chest, making to fall to your knees but she caught you, bringing you back up to her and holding you in her arms like you had never aged a day. "'e might not be back in a little while s'all, love. But we... we'll be okay, won't we, dearie." The small smile she offered you was weak and watery, and you could hardly see it through the tears that burned hot trails down your cheeks. Angry tears, the tears of God forgotten. The tears you had no right to, not after everything you had done and even more you hadn't done in the war that made things bad and the peace that made it worse. "We're gonna be just- just fine. We're gonna be just fine." she murmured, over and over under her breath, steady as the tides and the beating heart that pulsed against your chest as you buried yourself into her embrace. 

And it was a lifetime and once more melted into one, all those mornings when you'd cycle with the paper boy to the bakery and your aunt would wrap you up in her arms and slip you a mint humbug from the basket by the counter, taking the newspaper and sending you on your way with a kiss and a promise to call later. Or the days when you'd come rushing in, a raging hurricane with the bells jingling behind you frantically like sirens, and she'd hold you tight as your uncle pressed a plasters on your knees and elbows and made you swear you'd stop fighting with the boys in your class but you all knew you would do no such thing. Like all the nights in the tiny bedroom above the bakery when you'd crawl up into their bed from your cot in the backroom, fitting in between them and dragging up the blankets to sleep in their arms. You never knew what you'd say if they'd asked the next morning what it was you were afraid of, because perhaps you were just afraid that you would spend another second without them when there they lay, so close to you, and you could reach out and touch them if you thought they would not fade away beneath your fingertips like the flowers you brought them everyday. 

If you closed your eyes tight enough he was there behind you, plasters in his hand and the smile on his face that you never saw him without. You thought perhaps that at least was your birthright, the right to smile and know that nothing was going to be okay but it would be just fine because that's the way it always was in this little town in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. That and the uncanny ability to survive no matter what, and something deep down told you that that would come in very handy in the years to come. 

You pulled apart all too soon, wiping your eyes on your coat-sleeves, sighing at the loss of contact as you put on a braave face and adjusted your eyes to the dim sunlight filtering in through the shop window. Outside on the street, still not a soul to be seen. 

"Tell me really, why'd'ya come back?" her tone warm but her eyes searching, and not for the first time you felt yourself being warned away from Small Heath. Little tiny things, slips of the tongue, tricks of the light, and enough to make you uneasy beyond all reason. Only a day since you had arrived, and already you were falling back into your old ways, getting nervous over even the smallest of things, searching blindly for meaning where you knew there was none. People knew things here, things that no one should ever be able to know, and it was only now that you were realising just how dangerous that was. You knew there were gypsies in this area, always had been since you were small but even then they kept mostly to themselves. In what letters you had received when you were away, few as they were, even you could not miss the subtle darkness that loomed over the neighbourhood, and you wouldn't be surprised if that age-old stand-off had finally been broken. Trouble was coming in Small Heath, and it had been due for a very long time. 

"Missed it, I s'pose. Only so much nursing you can do before your brain sort of turns to mush." 

"Oh I'm sure. Could never stomach the thought of it me'self." her eyes held yours, growing suddenly distant and thoughtful as though struck with a glimpse of some distressing fate, too soon snatched away as you tried to find a meaning in her troubled expression. " 'S a shame, really. We were all so proud of yer. Thought y'might get away for good this time." 

You laughed, recalling the memories of that particularly cold and rainy autumn when you had waddled to the station, resplendent in all your six-year-old glory, with a bedsheet of books and a teddy-bear slung over your shoulder and your mother's nice red scarf, and had asked for the next train to London. You had been sent home with an iced bun and a wide smile on your face, your parents and your aunt and uncle and half of the neighbourhood carrying you home on their shoulders and staying round for tea in the church and by the time tea was over you had forgotten why you tried to leave at all. But that was so many millennia ago, and then there was that second time when no one had been able to stop you again, and this time you really could remember why you left. This town was too small, far too cramped to fit around the universe inside of your mind, and there was no where left to go but away. 

But your aunt was not smiling anymore. Now you could really see the wrinkles that had etched their deep tracks into her brows, the crows-feet around her eyes but, even more visible and more worrying still, the frown-lines that made you wonder how much you had missed that you would spend the rest of your uneventful life making up for. 

"Y'know, I think I thought so too. For a little bit, I mean." you rubbed the back of your neck and turned to catch a thin ray of golden sunlight on your face. "Thought I'd save up a bit of money and my myself a place a long, long way away from here. It's funny - I think I've spent my whole life trying to get away from here and I always end up right where I started. Makes you think, doesn't it, was I really ever gonna do it? It was nice while it lasted, but it was never gonna last. Think I ought to have known, huh." you blinked, and your eyes were dry and loveless now. You thought you could almost see the last scraps of the world you'd left behind, drifting away into the sky upon the smoke that curled in the street. And you were right, you had always known you would be when you sat down and really thought about it and thought to yourself that this had all been very nice, hadn't it, but now it was time to put down those toys and childish feelings and come back to the real world because that's what adults did. 

Somewhere in that wasteland of wasted years you knew that you'd grown up, and you pushed away the face that swam into your mind at the thought - blurring softly around the features, a little too big in the eyes, too sharp in the jaw, the skin stretched tight over jutting bones that made him seem too rough, too cruel to be the man you had loved so much in those days when you were trying with all you wee to remember love at all, come little as it may, but unmistakably him, just as those early mornings had been for you and him alone, and all the world could wait a little longer. You were forgetting him, and the thought was the best you'd had in days. No face, no letters, and soon no love at all. Just like it never happened. 

When you came to again the sunlight had gone, disappeared into the bleakness of the morning. You caught your aunt's gaze hot on your face again, pitiful and soft, softer than anything you had yet seen in this harsh town in all the day you'd been here now. 

"So what now?" 

"Would you believe me if I said I had absolutely no idea?" no, of course she wouldn't. You always knew; you always had, all that time when you were a child and you had your book of stories and every one of them a life you couldn't wait to lead, and every page a new adventure you had etched into your mind. And then the war had come along, and the hospital and the bodies and Tommy, and somewhere along the way the book of stories in your mind had given way to every night's new nightmare. 

"Then let me help you start." she took your hand in hers, and as she brought it up to her smiling lips you could see the liver-spots on the wasted skin, age playing upon the fingers, tangling at the wrist. 

"You don't-" 

"Shhh, shut up and let me help you dammit. You ain't going nowhere without a job, that'y'know." 

"Perhaps, but I-" 

"You're working here." 

"I... I am?" you squinted a little in confusion. The bakery was beautiful, you could tell every inch of it from any other on the face of the earth, could map it with your eyes closed as you did so many times in that unfamiliar dormitory in sunny Kent, but even you could not deny that it was tired and so was she. In the corners, the dust was gathering in dark shadows that were darker now that the sun had all but gone away, and if you could run a finger down the corridor walls and trace each line in the bright green paper you knew the cracks would be deep enough to lose your life into. 

"You are. 'Least until you find your way back out there." 

You could not help but frown at that. You couldn't say you hadn't thought about it just yet because you had, all last night and in every vacant moment since you woke again this morning. It was stuck in your mind like a hot coin, burning a hole into your head as you tried to push it away until later. Where to go, and whether to go at all. These last days had been the worst you'd known in all your life, the coldest and most draining, and you wanted nothing more than to crawl into your bed and never come out again. Of course, that was entirely out of the question, and you had come to the reluctant conclusion that, at least for the time being, you would be staying where you were. 

"Thanks." 

" 'S the least I could do. We help our own round here, remember." 

"Then I guess I'm in your debt, eh? 'Least til I can pay you back." 

"Don't worry about it. I'm just glad to have you back. It's," she glanced around the room, at the baskets of bread and the trays of sweets, her eyes stopping on the picture frame on the counter, a faded black-and-white photo of your uncle's smiling face. You wondered if he was smiling still, somewhere in the no man's land of now and forever, where morality and life were a little less black-and-white themselves. "It's what he would have liked. I think." 

"I wish I knew." you wished you knew a lot of things that you did not, and you wished you could see a lot of things that you could not either. You wished more than anything that you could do it all again, change a couple of things and see how the story changed for better or for worse. You wished things could be different, be better or just a different kind of bad, anything at all now that you could not live with your truth. The truth you made for yourself and would spend the rest of your life running from because that's what adults did, right? 

"I don't think you ever knew just how proud of you he always was. Near broke his heart in two when yer left." You wanted to scream at that, to cry all over again and this time never stop, because this time you knew that you had let another person down for the last time. He was so very proud of you, and right now even you weren't so proud of all these things you'd done. You wondered if he regretted it all now, and new that he would not. That was the beauty of believing in someone - nothing they could do could ever prove you wrong. 

"Why can't we just-" 

"Because you and I are humans, and that's all we're meant to be, dear. These are the hardest of times, but they are the ones you learn the most from. Some day you'll have hurt enough to realise that hurting isn't all there is to making your mistakes - there's healing too. There's healing every day." 

And she pressed into your handles the thick handle of a bread basket, laying into it loaves and loaves of bread, and a handful of sugary pastries that made you smile. The pastries had always been your favourite when you were small, trays and trays of bakewell puddings and banbury cakes and sometimes if you were lucky, coventry godcakes too, carried home in baskets strapped to the front of your bicycle as you tried to keep them from spilling out onto the road but racing home to catch them while they were still warm at the centre from the sunlight through the bakery window. 

You could smell them, taste the sugar that rose in a white plume as she clapped her hands together and then rested one on your back. Leading you into the backroom, a little smaller and a little darker than it had been in the photobook of your mind, she pulled out an apron and pressed it to your chest, moving your hands to hold it tight. You didn't even have to look to know whose it was (or rather, whose it had been), and also that she would not let you say no. 

"You'll just be on deliveries to begin with, getting to know the neighbourhood and all." 

"I did used to live here, y'know!" 

"Yeah, it's just that... 's a bit different, and all. Meet some people, have some fun. Maybe it's time you try something new, eh?" she ruffled your hair and you laughed brightly, honestly, ducking away and balancing the basket on your hip. 

"Whatever you say," you sighed in mock-defeat, draping your coat over the counter and pulling on the apron in its place. It was too big for you, wide and comically long at the knees, but the fabric was soft and wrinkled and stained with the story of a life you had missed, and you breathed in the smell of bread and his cologne that washed over you like his arms around you once again. It was a good moment. 

Resting her hand lightly on you arm and bringing you gently out of your daydream, your aunt held a folded scrap of paper out to you. The names written on it in her tidy hand were familiar, childhood playmates and teachers, neighbours and family friends. Back when the whole town knew each other, when you were all one family. Find the houses, find the people, leave the bread and leave the house like you had been there every day instead of thousands of miles away, living out a fairytale and pretending you were in love. 

You shot her a quick smile of thanks, turning away and opening the door and filling your senses with the sound of the street, shot through with the jarring melody of the bells above the door. 

"Be careful out there. I love you." 

You couldn't remember the last time someone had told you that, save for the lapse in your history that had been him, and it soothed your aching bones and the weight that pulled you down beneath the dirty cobblestones to hear the words you so longed to wrap around you and hide behind forever. She loved you, and the rest of the world could not come close. And, stepping out into the street and closing the paint-peeling door behind you, you turned your face towards Birmingham.


	5. Blinded By Your Light- Part 5. On Befriending.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it's peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.

As you walked, you ran your fingertips along the bricks of the buildings that passed by. There was a part of you that was still wondering if any of this was real at all. Another part of you that prayed that it was not. The dirty little neighbourhood, the handful of children playing in the street with broken toys and trousers stained with mud like the blood of Mother Nature hung to slaughter, all of it the world you knew but oh so slightly different, colder and greyer like the shadow of a life burning away to darkness. 

The sound of the city had crescendoed gradually into a muffled chorus of footsteps and hushed conversation, women in long coats and shawls making their way hurriedly down the street to the market, and you remembered the city from up on your uncle's shoulders, looking down upon the shopfronts like the world you owned alone, a tangle of memories and faces you thought a younger you might have known and loved, but now all you felt was apathy, the sadness that came with having neither family nor home, nor way to regain the feeling of belonging that you were beginning to suspect you would never find again. 

You found the first house easily enough, half-run down and with a bright bloom of red upon the door that may have been paint or blood or something in between. You were beginning to get used to the sight of blood everywhere you looked, and it made you even more uneasy. When you knocked upon the door, a sweet old lady with a kind face answered, and you wrapped up her loaves of bread in paper and gave them to her, thanking her for the money she gave you in return and pocketing the small change she pressed into your palm as a welcome-back gift. 

And so you found your way across Small Heath, your basket depleting quickly as you knocked and gave and went away again, reading and rereading the names on your slip of paper as though those empty words could somehow bring back all the memories that were fading in the cold light of reality. The town you had been waiting so long to return to was here in front of you, and it was not your home at all. 

It was an hour or so later that you came at last to the last name on the list, Gray. A pub, The Garrison, a little a little larger than most of the others you had seen before, the curtains drawn and tied tight against the street and you wondered what they were keeping out, and worse still, what they were keeping in. You knocked on the door, scrubbed clean but you could still catch the faded mural of blood upon the sturdy wood, and stepped back into the street to wait. A minute passed, then two and three and four, and you were searching the building for somewhere safe to leave the basket when the door finally cracked open. Through the gap in the door, you caught the gleam of light on cold black metal, the mouth of a gun. You held up your free hand, trying to keep your voice from shaking as you tried to pick out a face through the sliver of gloom revealed behind the door. 

"I-I have bread. I'm delivering bread. I work-I work for the bakery!" you spat out, letting out a long sigh of relief as you saw the gun lower. 

"Where's April?" your aunt, the one who usually made the deliveries. The one they trusted, because she hadn't run off to Kent to fuck around with the rich kids. 

"I'm sorry, she said I would be doing... this. I work there now." you held out the basket of bread as a peace offering, and the door opened wider to reveal a woman with tight brown curls and eyes that seemed to stare right through you, taking in all your secrets and reading each thought that flashed through your head. She was beautiful in a way that made you so sure that she had killed men for calling her beautiful, and in her face was a power more than that of any king that you had known. The power of the goddess, waiting behind beloved gods and knowing she was more. 

"S'pose you're her niece now, en't yer?" she muttered, almost sneered, and you felt that she could feel the pain within you, 

"Yeah. Yeah, that's right." you steeled, straightening your spine and forcing yourself to hold her gaze, taking in the depth of her cool brown eyes, so dark they were almost black. 

"Away quite a while, weren't yer." she looked at you and suddenly you knew that you were never going to come back and slip back into what remained of your life because here she was and she knew, and so did everyone in this godforsaken neighbourhood and so did you, and there was nothing you could do to take back what you'd already done. Your entire story was written out before you for the whole word to read and you were desperately trying to tape together the pages before the words began to leak off the paper and onto your skin. 

"I was... I was working." and you both knew that was not true. You were running away because you thought if you didn't get away then you never would, and this town was too small for the chaos in your mind. And now your mind was empty, the town so large you could hear your thoughts in every step you took away from the life you had tried so hard to find. You weren't working, you were caught up in a daydream that you all knew couldn't last, and you were fighting to stay asleep as the rest of the world hurt and bled and died without you. 

"Not fer yer dad, eh?" she raised an eyebrow at that, and it sent a shot of guilt through your heart. She was right - of course she was - and she knew it. It was difficult to see that the thought was tearing you apart, pulling at every last trace of humanity in your cold and lonely body, hurting you over and over and a little more every time. You had left your father, and now look what had happened, and you knew it wasn't your fault but wasn't it? 

"N-no. Thought maybe I'd try something new." Something new, a million miles away, somewhere new, with someone new and now you were here and he was not and you were doing the same things you did a million years ago as though you never left and there was all the world and more to remind you that you had. 

"And now yer back? Wonder how that turned out for yer." and she could see and you could see and everyone in this goddamn town could see the pain in your eyes and somehow she needed more. 

"It was fine, thank you. I mean, I'm glad to be back, though." you smiled weakly, and in a way it was easier to be home and tell them all the truth that you'd made up on the train here than to stay away and keep lying that everything was fine. This neighbourhood was messed up and you'd missed a thousand lifetimes of the ones you loved the most, but now you were here and you wouldn't miss another day. You had missed the worst of times, and it only made sense that you were back now and it was time for you to face what you had put off for so long. 

"Shouldn't be. Don't see why anyone should be glad to be back in this shit'ole." her eyes darkened, a shadow passing over them and she seemed all at once the great and forbidding spider at the centre of this web of darkness and change. You wondered, not for the first time, what it was she knew. 

"Ain't so bad, is it?" you rocked back and forth on your heels, pushing your point as you looked into her eyes as though held in place. 

"And you would know? Been away quite a while, ain't yer. Don't think things have changed?" her voice was lilting and undeniably cruel, a depth to it that made it all a terrible test, designed to catch you unawares. 

"So I hear. Colder than it used to be, at least." your joke was met with a small smile which took you by surprise. A soft smile, human, like she was letting you in but not too far. 

"Maybe it just seems it." she looked around her at the street, grey as the sun passed behind a dark cloud, and then back to you and your basket of bread. Her eyes rested on the basket a moment, as though she had only just remembered why you were here. "How many more stops 'ave yer got left?" 

"Oh this is my last." you lifted up the basket, gesturing to the last few loaves of bread and pastries left in it. 

"Good. Come in and have tea." It was less of an invitation than a statement, she searched you again with her piercing eyes, glancing behind her at the front of the pub. 

"...now?" 

"Yes." she smiled tightly, and even before she had finished speaking she was turning on her heel and going back into the pub. There was something about her, about the building before you and the way she seemed to know so much about you and about the rest of the world you had not yet seen, that pulled you in behind her, and before you had time to think it through you were closing the front door behind you. 

"O-okay, sure. I don't want to intrude or-" you found yourself in the main room, empty save for the bartender wiping down the bar, whose eyes widened as you entered and you shot him a quick smile as you passed. On the other side of the room, the woman was taking two china cups from a cabinet. She turned at your words, and fixed you with that sharp stare. 

"Then don't intrude. It's just tea, (Y/N.)" she laid the cups down on a table in the middle of the room, disappearing into an anteroom and reappearing a moment later with a teapot and a bowl of sugar. She sat, gesturing at the other chair expectantly, and you sat opposite her, setting down the basket of bread beside your chair. For a moment, as she poured out two cups of tea, setting one in front of you carefully, no one spoke, the only sound the rush and squeak of the bartender's cloth against the counter as he rubbed it clean. 

"Thank you." you took a sip of your tea, winced as it burnt your tongue. The woman opposite you tried not to smile at that, and you tried not to blush. "I never caught your name." 

"I never gave it." she looked down at her tea, "Polly. Gray." 

"Probably knew my parents, didn't you." you pretended you weren't glancing up through your eyelashes as you waited for her to answer, trying to catch any emotion that might have passed across her face. But her face was impassive, and she took a while to answer. 

"Once. Good people, honest. Never did them much good, but they were honest." her face was emotionless, her low chuckle bitter and all-knowing, as though she knew every last thought that had brought them to this sad fate. 

"Everyone seems to know them but me. Everyone seems to know me but me." you smiled bitterly, tapping against the china of your cup with your nails, and if you knew her better you might have said that she pitied you, but any woman you might have known was gone now, and the one you saw before you was utterly impossible. Once the moment had passed you had no idea why you'd said it, but she seemed to soften to you once you had, and she wrapped her hands around her cup thoughtfully, eyes and mind wandering listlessly around the room. 

"War'll do that to yer. Believe me, I know." her voice was far away, heard across a canyon as though she were anywhere in the world except for here with you, and you lifted your heavy head to look at her as she spoke. She looked quiet, dreamy, still harsh and cold but something so much more, and she reminded you so much of your mother. 

"Your family?" you were trying not to pry, unsure of how far your luck would let you go, but all of a sudden you really wanted to know. She was incredible, a beautiful enigma and you were looking in through the window at this life that was so much more than your own, snatching snapshots of a lifetime filled with happiness but even more of pain, trying to piece together the story before she closed herself up again. There was something about her, about every word she said, that made you want nothing more than to hang onto every line and word and syllable, breathe it all in like air to stay alive and find out more and more and more. 

"My nephews. Everyone knows the Shelby's apart from me, apparently." 

The name shocked you, nearly made you dropped your teacup to the floor. You blinked, eyes wide and suddenly very much awake, trying not to let on that your entire world was resting on what she would say next, and you wondered could she know? You were almost sure she'd seen it the second she saw your face, the story that wasn't even a story, more like the scribbled fairytales of a child alone with the fever of their mind, the way your life might fit with hers in a jigsaw puzzle of impossible fate. 

And then you came to, shook your head and pushed the thought aside. He said he had no family, no home to go to. He said there was nothing waiting for him but work and the inescapable cold of these bleak British winters, no aunt at all in her tidy pub with cups of tea made ready in the parlour. Wouldn't he have told you if there was something like this in his past (in his present it would be now, for you were nothing but his past, and that if you were lucky; when the letters never came it had become very clear that you were nothing to him at all)? And if he would not have told you, what did he have to hide? No, the name was a coincidence, and you knew better than to ask more about Polly's nephews as she sat, unusually vulnerable, before you. There were far too many Shelby's in England to lose your head over every one. 

For a long moment you sat once more in silence, taking in the pub as you tried not to meet her eyes. You feared she might pity you, or you might pity her, and you were not entirely sure which would be worse. Pity was the cheapest thing that one could buy in this cruel age of love and loss, and you would not whore yourself out for less than love could pay you peace. 

The silence was filled with the crash of footsteps down stairs in the backroom, bursting in through the doors and into the pub in a whirlwind of chaos and shouting. Through the main room came a very dishevelled girl, hair a mess, makeup smeared down her face and her dress half unbuttoned. You bit back a smirk, knowing full well it wasn't your place to make any sort of comment on the scene that was unfolding all around you. Polly was rubbing her eyes wearily with one hand, sighing exasperatedly and you wondered how often this happened. The man who ran into the room was in a similar state, his fly undone and his shirt pulled out, and you thought you had a pretty good idea of what they were doing, try as you might not to think about it too much. 

Breaking into a quick jog, the girl hurried past you, throwing open the pub doors and flouncing out as the boy followed her, shouting at her to just wait a minute and listen. By the time he had passed your table she was gone, out of the door and probably some way out of sight, and he gave up, leaning back against the bar and throwing his head back in defeat. You wondered if now was the right time to tell him that his fly was still open (probably not). 

"I was just sayin' how I really missed this." Polly drawled sarcastically, lifting her eyes languorously from her tea and drawing them to his pathetic state. 

"Mornin' Pol." the boy muttered, looking at her and not bothering to hide his curious expression when his eyes landed on you. "And Pol's friend." 

"(Y/N)." you smiled at him, and he grinned widely at you, reaching out to shake your hand and took it back when he caught Polly's glare. 

" 'ey, don't you even think about it, John Shelby, so help me I will string you up fer yer brothers." she pointed at him, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. 

"Right, right, well that's that then. Value my life, don't I, so think I might be headin' off." he raised his eyebrows at you dramatically and you bit back a bubble of laughter, "Haven't seen Arthur, 'ave yer?" tucking in his shirt and following your nod to his trousers, he straightened himself up. 

"God only knows where 'e is now. Prob'ly gettin' high in some backstreet, best not try an' find 'im just yet." he murmured something vaguely resembling an agreement, and started for the door, grabbing a jacket and a cap from a stand by the door. In the sunlight through the window, the brim of the cap shone bright and unnatural, a thin line of silver splitting the dark fabric and your eyes were held for a long moment, until he moved away and the sunlight shifted and there was nothing there at all. Strange. "Back for dinner, yeah, else I'll have yer guts fer garters!" she called after him and he laughed out loud at that. The way she grinned at him as he left, you knew she really loved him, and the sun shone just a little brighter on the fractured remnants of Small Heath. 

"Your nephew?" 

"Aye, youngest but one. A right pain, him and all 'is brothers. 'S a wonder I keep 'em around." She muttered, harshly and fondly all at once in a way you had never known before. 

"House full of boys, must make you the sane one." you joked, and she cracked a smile at tha, taking a long sip of her tea and never taking her eyes off you. 

"If I say so myself. And what about you? No young man sweepin' you off yer feet, eh?" 

"Not... anymore. No." it was drawn-out and slow, as though you hadn't quite known that you were saying it until the words were hanging before you, short and hard and filled with a sadness you didn't know you had in you. It had taken all morning and most of this early afternoon to convince yourself that you were a soldier, and in your mind were darker dawns than this morning's hellish revelations. You had lost, but you had lost before and once more would not break down the walls it had killed you putting up. 

"Shame. Still, there are plenty goin' around, a girl like you won't be hard up." 

"Neither was a girl like her, I dare say." you grinned, nodding your head to the door where the girl had burst out, barely-dressed. She sighed again, smiling and shaking her head, and you thought what a privilege it was to make her smile. You wondered if it brought back the way she was before, and if someday you would be as she was now - bitter, cold and loving still, the epitome of pain, and beautiful pain there too. The thought made you quite sad. 

"My nephews are... misbehaving, but they are good men." and then, under her breath and you could barely catch it, "Most of them." 

You knew better than to ask. You knew better than to push the boundaries of where your luck would take you, how much she'd let you see. There was a darkness in everything she did that made you sure that there was darkness inside her soul, clawing to get out, and there were things about her that you didn't want to know. 

"I think I need some time to myself, just a little longer. I've seen my fair share of boys where I've been, I'm sure." and it was true, you'd seen the bodies of men not much bigger than the boys who followed when all the men were sent and used and brought back in their Sunday best. Men with graves and vicars to send them on their way, and later as the years went by more and more boys, clothes stripped from bodies long since cold and blue, buried in each other's arms as they had run away to war, one grave unmarked and no god left to go to. And you had seen the living, not men nor boys but something else and something worse and something clothed in blood and anger, named by cursing tongues. You'd seen your fair share of those who survived and were not men at all, just shells, men who fought inside themselves, were told the war was over but it wasn't, not for them. These were not men, these were not man nor beast nor body left untouched by Death's kind hand, these were pain and pain alone, the remnants of a hatred borne by few and paid in price by thousands. To think that you would someday be as they were now, the unremembered scraps of being less than human, unremembered, it was enough to last a lifetime. It was true - you had seen your fair share of boys. 

"A smarter choice than any I've 'eard around 'ere in god only knows 'ow long." her eyes were kind, and you knew then that she knew all that you had seen because she had seen it too, every day in this graveyard of a town where everything seemed dead or dying, so bitter was the dull grey daylight. 

Once more the room was plunged into silence, the air heavy with a million words you could not, would not, say. The two of you looking off into the distance, finishing your cups of tea as the bartender disappeared into the backroom. And when the tea was all gone, the bar steeped in gloom as the sun slid away behind the clouds outside the window, you set down your cup, clearing your throat and making to stand. 

"I suppose you should be off now, eh?" she glanced up at you, scrutinising and cold as the moment you had met, as though you had seen nothing of her at all. 

"Yeah, think so." You lifted the bread-basket, so long forgotten, onto the table. Polly reached into her pockets and you waved her away. " 's okay. I think the tea makes us even." There was a line on the sheet of addresses that your aunt had given you that warned you not to charge the Shelby's, and you didn't entirely want to find out why. 

As she turned to call down her niece and whatever of the house remained hidden in the backrooms, you quietly took your leave, slipping out through the front door with only the glimpse of dark hair and neat dress to tell you she was real at all. 

________________________________________________________________________________

It was not long after that you met Ada. Standing in the market, sent there by the empty bags of apples in the bakery storeroom and the way your aunt looked at you, pitying and soft as though she knew as well as you did that this town had nothing but broken memories for you. Fragments of a lifetime, never enough to hold you, enough to remind you every day why you ran away, why you tried so hard to never come back. First it was the spiders in the church rooms, big and black and sinister as you tried to push them out of mind. Then it was the dark itself, stealing in first slowly then all at once, running up your spine and over your body like a second skin, the body you would become in time to come. You had never been afraid of the dark before, but now you closed your eyes and all you saw was slaughter, the men you could not save and, even worse, then men you could and wished you hadn't. The screaming in the upper wards, late at night when you should have been asleep but the shouting called you and you couldn't stay away, not when there was pain and you were lying awake in the room not far away, not when the shadow of Death lurked in every corner, watching, waiting. Death was always there, and now in the darkness of the church you wondered if he was still, standing over you and waiting, always waiting. It sent a shiver up your spine. 

You shook away the thought, reaching down to turn over the pears in the market stall, running your thumb distractedly over the bumps and craters in the smooth green skin. The market was quiet for a Thursday morning, the air thick with tense silence as you wandered around the stalls, shooting quick smiles as you passed the vendors. Gathering up the pears, a handful of apples, some cherries and a bright satsuma in your bag, you wandered up to the vendor, an old man reading behind the counter. You cleared your throat gently, smiling as he lifted his head wearily. 

"Quiet, isn't it." you murmured, more to yourself than to him or to the woman you had noticed not far away, turned away and running the soft blue fabric of a blouse through her fingers. 

"You'd be surprised. People come and go, don't talk to each other anymore." he grunted, gesturing at the rows and rows of stalls, the handful of people hanging listlessly around the baskets filled with fruit and vegetables and clothing and odds and ends and whatever could be salvaged from this hopeless wreck of war. 

"What would you have them say?" you mused, paying for the fruit and thanking him with a smile. 

"I'd have 'em be a little more thankful. We're all hurt, just some of us're making somethin' of all this hurt." the girl had a mild voice, subdued and welcoming as you hadn't seen in anything else here in this forbidding town. She turned to look at you and you knew the eyes that met yours had seen a lot more than they let on. She was like Polly, but sweeter, gentler, as though she had seen all the evils of the world and let them make her kind. 

She brought the dress down, paid for it and stood beside you, stealing a glance at you in a way that made you think she hadn't meant for you to notice, and the simple act of softness, humanity, made you melt a little. 

"You're not from around here, are yer?" she squinted at you, head tilted a little as she took you in. But this time it was friendly, reassuring, trying to get a picture of you because she was interested in you, not the story you'd left behind you. So you let her; you turned to face her, met her gaze unflinching. 

"Just moved back, actually." at this she laughed a little, high-pitched and disbelieving, and you rubbed the back of your neck awkwardly with your free hand. 

"What'd yer do that for?" 

"Ask me that a week ago and I might've had an answer." you said sadly, rolling an apple around in your hand distractedly. 

"Not anymore?" her eyes were wide and sympathetic, dark eyes like Polly's yet unassuming, understanding, eyes that had loved and that had never stopped. Eyes that had loved when the world would not love them back. Perhaps you were reading too much into it. 

"Not anymore." in truth you lost purpose like blood and hope and love, seeping out of the cracks in your splintered soul as you walked the town day after day with your basket of bread and without your future before you. You were fast beginning to think that all these last years away from Small Heath had been nothing more than a dream, fading back into grim reality as you woke alone in the church anterooms, gone entirely by breakfast. 

"Yer the baker's girl, back from France?" her words caught you unawares, and you stifled your surprise. 

"You knew?" She knew, Polly knew, you wondered if the whole city, the whole world, could know. Would they smile when they saw you, the pathetic little lass who couldn't quite face it here and couldn't quite run away, or frown at the girl who saw the world and all the pain it had to bear and said she wasn't made for that. 

"My aunt, she's... very good at this sort of thing." she lifted her chin with a sort of pride that made you think that there was love you didn't know yet, the love of a pilgrim for their wandering God, and it was all she had to offer. 

"Polly Gray." you guessed, testing the name on your tongue like the taste of some strange medicine on your restless, fevered soul. 

"The very same." she grinned, taking you by the arm and leading you away from the stall. A little bemused but not displeased at the sudden rush of affection, you gave in to her, looking up at her as she began to talk quickly about the buildings you passed, the families that lived therein. You heard her as though through the glass, in some waking dream, her words floating around your head and you were half-aware, half-distracted, taking in the street you knew and the girl you did not. 

"People here are different, aren't they." you wondered aloud as a lady hurried past you, meeting your eyes briefly and quickly ducking her head. She pulled her broad hat down lower over her face and you dreamed of what she was trying to hide. Everyone in this town carried the air of a criminal, and you had no doubt many were little less than that. 

"Aye, y'should meet my brothers. Right bastards they are, but good enough men." there was something about it that made you think immediately of Polly. The pride, the love, all the sarcastic purity ringing through her voice that made you think for a glorious moment that this was all some grim facade, the family behind it sweet and ordinary. Girls that would go to the market, to the pictures, chasing boys and chasing secrets. Boys that would run and play and drink in the evenings, coming home to wives and children and no secrets to keep them up at night. You could live like that, beautifully mundane. The shadow of Death loomed over your shoulder, and you would invite Him over for tea and biscuits every Sunday. 

"So I've heard." and there was the lie, comforting and cruel. You had heard of the Shelby boys, dark folks who cut and killed and left the neighbourhood a little smaller every night. Tales of fights ran in the Birmingham streets in early mornings, late at night, the fairytales of a people whose God had went away. There was magic in those silvery caps and there was magic in the faces hidden underneath, and all of Small Heath knew it, feared it, respected it. Once again you reassured yourself that this was not your Tommy, because your Tommy was sweet and your Tommy was good. He had never killed a man, save all those creatures that fell before him in the war gone by. Your Tommy was not the monster that lurked in the streets, that lurked in your mind insidious as the cold and twice as bewitching. 

"So everyone's 'eard. Can't get a bloody moment's rest from all this 'Arthur this, Thomas that, John whatever'. A plague upon this town, I'm tellin' yer, and I'm their sister." it was strong and it was heartfelt, and through all the emotions you almost missed the name, slipped in like it was just another word but no other word had ever sounded so sweet. It was a mistake, not a slip of the tongue but a coincidence that brought him flooding back into your senses so strong you could almost taste the harsh carbolic soap on his skin when you had lain beside him in those late nights in the hospital. You could feel him oh so near you, and you ached to have him here. 

"Dating must be a nightmare, eh?" you knew it was what she wanted you to ask, still there was something quiet and smug in it that made you think there was something she was not saying, to you or her aunt or the rest of Small Heath, some glorious secret that she was bound to keep and you were just dying to know. In small towns like these, secrets were the only way to get out for good, and you knew that better than any. 

"Don't even bother. Boys 'ere 're like the Black Death. Easy to find, awful to look at and even 'arder to get bloody rid of." she shook her head and you laughed, your mind straying back to the girl running through the pub, whose name you had later learnt and promptly forgotten. 

"Aye, but worth a shot." you winked at her playfully and she rolled her eyes. It was nice - the empty street and you and her, and you the happiest you had been in a very long time. Nothing romantic, nothing upsetting, nothing at all but the grey sky and the greyer city beneath and the colours that were painting your mind a million shades of alive. 

"So was the war, don't catch me wanting t'go back." 

"You and me both." you sighed, but it was sadder than you had intended, and as you neared the street corner she turned you by the elbow to look at you face-to-face. 

"You served?" the humour was gone from her voice, in its place a bleak respect that you had not heard before. You told people you had served and they would say it was a bloody shame about the war, should never have happened. And you knew it was true - the war had broken you, body and mind, and when your five-year sentence was over it had spat you out the other side, hopeless and alone. Still the war had got you out of here, and the war had made you different. Older. There was a cruel maturity in you that made you think you saw things different now, but maybe you were just kidding yourself. Most of the time you didn't know what you were doing anymore. 

"Yeah, Flanders General Hospital. Was a nurse for god knows how many years." you rubbed your eyes with a trembling hand, if only to break for a moment the line of her staring at you, brown eyes deep as the river you had left behind, warmer than those summer days with him. God, did she look like him. 

"Front line. Can't imagine what you've seen." she whispered, taking your hand in hers and tracing a circle over the back of it with a delicate hand. You didn't want her to imagine what you'd seen. More than anything, you wished she would never see what you saw, never live like you had, always a room and a corridor away from your own death and walking ever nearer as you fought to save a world hell-bent on its own destruction. 

"Seen too much. Sometimes feels like I can never close my eyes again, all so fresh in my mind." you blinked slowly and she squeezed your hand tight in hers. 

"My brothers... they were up there. Most of them. Awful thing it was. Didn't come back the same at all." it was awkward and strung together like she had never said the words before, was putting them together as she looked at you, and you thought she might have trusted you a little. You thought she might trust anyone who listened to her truly. 

"They never do. I didn't." you choked out the last part, the words sticking in your throat as you tried to say what had plagued your mind since the moment you stepped off the train in Kent, those short and agonising words that you knew the whole world was just waiting for you to say. 

"War's changed, world's changed. Nothing stays the same." 

"And all the better for it. Think I'd go insane like this forever. That being said, could definitely do without the sleepless nights." you hadn't told anyone about the nights, about what you saw and what haunted you as you tossed and turned in the endless darkness, praying for it all to be over at last. But now, out in the wan winter daylight, you felt a little better for having it all out in the open air, having it all in her hands and imploring her to keep it there, to hold it close and make it all go away. You trusted her, you loved her, and you had never met her. 

"Then come and visit me. Always fun at the Shelby household." she reached up to brush your cheek tentatively, taking in the line of your cheekbone, holding you in her hand as though you just might fall apart. She took her hand away and you smiled sadly at her. 

"So I've heard. With all due respect, I just got back from a warzone. Don't think I'm gonna be running on into another any time soon." you were trying not to hurt her, trying not to let her know that you had a hundred million stories for every letter of that awful name, and none of them ended happily. You wanted to see her again, but if all there was behind her was the last name that you hated, had loved and lost and missed like hell, you knew that all it would ever bring was pain. 

"I might just come to you then. Seek my refuge in the house of God, eh? At least, Pol thinks so." her words weighty, and you wondered what she prayed about when she was alone at night. The war was over, anger all that was left behind in the ashes of a country burnt at its great moral stake. You knew better than to wish all the anger, the sadness and broken desperation, away because behind it there was nothing left. There was only the rage to hold your aching bones together, only the hatred that you were alive to keep you alive at all. 

"Don't think God's really in there anymore. Think he jumped ship soon as all this bullshit started. A countryful of men with guns and personal vendettas to fulfil, ain't exactly the place for a god, is it." you hadn't meant for it to come out so vindictive, a silent curse but upon whom you could not say. You blamed the men in the streets, with their guns and their anger and the blood that crept upon your skin as you lay in bed, awake. You blamed the men in charge, and their soft chairs where they had sat and watched the war unfold before them like some dreadful game of chess. You blamed God as he frowned down upon you and Small Heath, sins like broken bodies in the street. And you knew you blamed yourself the most, the way you ran and the way you came back and the gun inside your pillowcase that you prayed you'd never use. The longer you spent in this grim neighbourhood the closer the gun seemed to your head. You took her arm and began walking again. 

"Me mam used to say that now's when you make yer own god. Have to make do with yer own hands." her hands were smooth and slender, hands that had never touched the sickly cancer of death, hands that were made to arrange flowers and shake hands and run over you as you kissed. You thought she would be a good kisser if you ever looked at her that way. You thought it best you didn't - there was love and there was friendship and you really, really needed a friend. 

"She sounds wise." you knew what to say, the way to make her open up. Her mother, the way her eyes lit up like she was talking about the end of the world, the smile in her voice that never made it to her face but glittered in her deep brown eyes. She loved endlessly, and she had lost still more. 

"She was. Was a woman, 'ats why." the two of you and something beautiful in common, something yours - a femininity that was beyond not starting wars. It was about ending wars, causing love, meaning more than the awful men that were all around you. 

"God knows we need more of 'em nowadays." you smirked faintly. 

"Amen to that." she laughed loud, and you couldn't help but stare. She really was beautiful when she was herself, in a way that made you not want to kiss her but keep her near you, protect her, make it all okay again like no one had for you. 

But the church was coming up before you and you knew you had to leave her here. You had only just met, and it would take a lot more than trust to invite her in to the darkness that lay beyond the tall church-doors. In there was a different hell, a hotter, crueller hell that she had never known, and the world was not made for good people like her. 

"Well this is me." you stopped her in front of the doors, shifting from foot to foot as you tried to find a way to say the goodbye that you'd been dreading all the way here. 

"I think I'll call on yer sometime." her lopsided grin made you laugh, and you tried to keep it quiet to avoid the echoes in the church that would carry your careless voice all the way to your father. Your father sat each day in the church, bowed before the altar, the only man who still believed in this dim and heathenish town. He would be there now, a saint in wrinkled robes and unseeing eyes, and you knew that somehow he would hear you here. This town was filled with men with ignorant sight, eyes that could see and hearts that overlooked, and your father alone was king. Sightless, he saw. He knew. 

"Oh will yer now?" you quirked a brow at her, praying she'd stand by and let you be persuaded. You'd let her call on you whenever, let her wake you in the nights when all the town was silent, let her break apart your lifeless live and fill the cracks with her smile, her laugh, the sweetness of her hands. It was not difficult to see, and you knew she saw it too. This whole town was lonely, and you were no exception. 

"Yeah, think so." she extracted herself from your hands, began to walk away and before you knew it you were calling her back, unable to let her slip away when you had just found her and she was the last good thing about this part of town. 

"Don't even know my name." you teased and she flicked her hair over her shoulder, grinning wide and toying with the new blue dress that was folded over her arm. And when the sun came down upon her, brighter than any dim star in this back-alley of Birmingham, you could swear there was nothing in the world that could be so beautiful, so heavenly and good than her. 

"Ada. Shelby." like it was something she was used to saying, but the last word soured her smile in a way that made you think she was anything but proud of it. Such power and she wanted no part of it; you wondered what kind of life she'd lead. 

"(Y/N). (Y/L/N)." your own name a stranger to your aching lips as you took her in, painted her in the blank canvas of your new and empty life as though she were the glorious sun to rise and rid you of your slough of night. 

"I'll see you later, (Y/L/N)." carefree and cool, she threw her head back over her shoulder and hurried away, skirt swishing behind her as her boots rang loud in the vacant street-corner. She wasn't looking at you anymore, and you stepped back to lean against the church wall and watch her as she disappeared around the corner, a flurry of bright colours and sun. 

"I hope you will." you said more to yourself than to her, knowing that she was already gone away, she couldn't hear you anymore. And then you breathed out, grinning like an idiot. She was stunning, another part of your soul and you for the first time since you had stepped off the train you knew that there was something in this town that really was your home. Ada, Polly, John, the strange little pub with the strange little people in a town where everything was far too big, big enough to lose yourself entirely in its labyrinth of sins. It was enough to make any lonely soul flock to their company, and who were you to differ? 

And so it was that you entered once more into the ominous gloom of the unlit church, taking with you your sins and all the crimes you had yet to commit, committing yourself once more into the judgement of your dark God.


	6. Blinded By Your Light- Part 6. On Coinciding.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N is the definition of ordinary. Studying at a medical school as far as she can get from her rainy hometown of Birmingham, she never expected to be shipped off the Flanders when the war was at it's peak. Much less to meet a handsome young patient with the most beautiful pair of blue eyes she had seen in her life who as fate would have it would fall into her lap.

And so the months came and went through the grey streets of Small Heath like the shadow of some endless night, ebbing and flowing with the tides of time, and for the first time in your life the world did not change at all. Only the warmer days warned you that this long winter could not last forever, and all of a sudden it was over and the days were longer, bright with the flowers that came to the bakery door every morning. You gave them with the bread as you made your rounds past houses where every day the memories came creeping back, softer and sweeter and there was no pain here anymore. And in the evenings there was dancing in the upstairs rooms of the pub, you and Ada and a million dresses laid around the chairs and bed and mirror as you spun and dipped into the ecstatic dream of freedom. You were a child again, and all the world was yours once more and he was not a part of it anymore and that was just fine. 

It would be a lie to say that you did not think of him, but it was only in the late nights when it was just you and your candle, looking out over the buildings at the trains as they wound away, a path you didn't take and would spend forever wondering what might have happened if you had. And when the spring fell away to summer you saw again the sunsets on the city that pulled you to the rooftop so many times before, wide-eyes wondering at the world you had not seen, ghosts of former lovers hanging onto your sleeve as you spread your arms like wings to fly away and knew you never could. Never would, because for the first time you could see no world but here outside your windows, and it suited you just fine. 

And there was you and Ada, and you and Polly, and sometimes you and John, sitting and having tea in the summer sunlight, chasing round the market in your shawls and coats and painting in your mind all the colours of the apples and carrots and plums like they meant everything in the world to you. No blood, not even in those nights when you could hear the guns ringing through the darkened streets and wondered almost where Small Heath ended and your tortured mind began, the memories of a war half-left behind and somehow never left. You were safe and you were happy, and everything was going to be just fine. 

Polly was opening up to you more and more as the winter melted away; by summer she was your mother, clasping your hands in hers and telling you to be wise and brave and sure of all you did, and all your stories were hers to read and note and read again whenever she saw your face and it was strangely comforting to see her everyday the same, even when she knew. She knew you, knew all you did and all you had done, and every time she looked at you there was no fear at all, and you wished for nothing more. Ada had become a friend and then a sister, she came to you at night when she could not bear to be alone with all the gunshots pounding out from their street and you both knew you'd never ask, never force her to tell what was best left unspoken, out of sight and out of mind. And there were the days when you returned to the church and there was John with your father in the little kitchen where the sun never seemed to reach all the way through the window, and you could not remember laughing as much as you did in those afternoons alone together when there was no world at all outside of your window and nothing at all between you and him. 

And soon July was ending, and you were sitting in the Garrison as usual, only now the sunlight was warm and calming on your face, streaming in in glorious waterfalls of melted gold through the front windows and bathing you in soft yellow glow. The room was silent, as it often was these days as the three girls sat thoughtfully, staring into your teacups and smiling softly, lethargically. These long summer days brought hot nights, the town shimmering in balmy heat and all the world a little crazier. There were fights in the evenings, hot blood on hot stone. Each night you hurried home a little earlier to find your away from the bubbling anger of the Garrison, where blood boiled by the bar. There was a storm brewing in the distance, dark and ominous as the clouds of cold autumn rain that hovered now in the early mornings, watchful as the eyes of God, and summer had lasted too long. 

At the sound of the door flung open, all three heads jerked up, the comfortable silence shattering instantly as the room was filled with heavy footsteps, the screech of the door where the oil had dried up in the heat of days gone by. Into the room there came a crowd of men in sharp grey suits and the familiar flat-cap, brims glittering and you really meant to ask what there was about it that made you so uneasy. 

"And make sure it's done by tomorrow, mind. We're not exactly rolling in spare time." 

And there he was, the crowd clearing around him and all you saw was him in front of you, beautiful as the moment you had left and he was so beautiful it took your breath away. And you thought you might cry, your eyes fixed on him and your cup of tea dropped back into its saucer on the table, and then his eyes met yours and suddenly he knew. 

"Go." he waved a hand and the men went, just like that, and Ada reached out to touch your arm and you held her hand tight, holding her in place because if you were left here, alone once more with him as though no time had passed at all, you weren't entirely sure what you'd do. 

"Tommy," it slipped out of your mouth, a whisper so weak he might not have heard it, but he did and his eyes were so cold. His face hard as stone and crueller still than that cold winter spent without him and without even his letters, promised as they were. The way he looked at you, you thought you might never have met him at all, for in those brilliant blue eyes there was an icy hatred you had never seen before, cold as the grave and unfeeling as he stared you down, willing you to speak or willing you to leave, you knew not which. Looking on at him in the hope of a sign, something small to tell you that this was indeed the same man who had kissed you on the train station, promised you a lifetime you knew he could not give, it tore you apart to know that you did not recognise this man at all. 

"(Y/N)." he spoke finally, voice flat and disinterested as if you were just another business proposal that he had no care to consider, the least wonderful thing he had seen all day. He remembered you - for a moment you had wondered if any of this had ever been real, if he simply did not know you at all, and in a way this was so much worse. He knew you, and even you could tell from his detached expression that he did not love you. "I wasn't expecting you." 

"Yeah, I gathered." through the agonising sadness that was pounding in your head and in your heart and ripping you into pieces there came a rush of bitterness, anger because hadn't he said that he would write to you until he could find you again, and wasn't he here in front of you now, a little taller and a whole lot crueller than the last time you had met? You let your hand slip out of Ada's and she and Polly stood quietly and disappeared into the backrooms. It was only you and him now, along with all the universe in between. 

"So where've yer been?" 

"In the hospital. Some of us couldn't leave." you muttered, breaking eye contact and taking in the pub, suddenly aware that where you had been waiting for this one moment since the moment he had left, now you would rather be anywhere on earth but here with him. This was anything but the sweet reunion you had dreamed it to be in all those lonely nights in the hospital and the days when you couldn't help but see his face in every beautiful thing around, and he was anything but the sweet man you had fallen so in love with in those days when you could almost forget that love was there at all, so hateful was the world behind you. 

"And now you're back. Funny how the world turns out." he sounded so much like his aunt had, that first day when she was so far from you, reading you like you could fall apart before her, your deepest secrets spilling unto her watchful eyes, and you wondered could he see himself written upon your aching soul the way you could feel it each night, eating you alive? And if you never learned from him, waited for him forever and became only the shreds of how his love had left you on that dreadful day on the platform, would he see that too? Or were you now too far away for him to find you, as you feared he was to you. 

"I'm not back for you." but yes you were, and both of you knew it. Your footsteps would always lead you back to him, unknowing as you were as you followed blindly into the pits of destiny's shame. You were here for him, and if you stayed you'd do that for him too. "You'd know if you'd written." 

"And why would I do that?" 

And there it was, the great and terrible blow that sent you reeling, his voice so harsh it cut into you with all the force his love had never borne for you. You laughed bitterly, and when you looked at him again all you saw was the cold and broken body of a man who had once loved and now could love no more. He never wrote, he never loved, was there anything this man could do? A kinder girl than you might have pitied him, but after everything you had done in these last years you were so much more than kind. You were proud, and you were furious. 

"Because there was a part of me that was so sure you loved me." your voice broke at that, and you prayed he wouldn't notice. He did, of course he did, he was Thomas Shelby and he noticed everything he could use to his own gain and suddenly you were realising that, but only after you had become yet another ploy he had slipped into his hands so easily. He had smiled at you and you used to feel special, but now you only felt like prey. You had been sure he loved you, just like you were sure that summer would come once the winter melted away, and that the sun would rise each morning and chase away the night, the simple certainties of nature, but now all you knew was that this winter was going to last a very long time, and the sun would be a long time rising. Outside the Garrison window the sun had passed behind a cloud; the room was quiet and grey, the colour gone away. 

"Don't be ridiculous." he grinned like his aunt, cold and cruel and utterly malicious, but there was no softness behind his eyes like you had caught in hers, and it made you shiver despite the warmth of the days. This was not the man you knew, but this was the man you had always feared he might become, for this was the man that you had seen a million times before in the faces as they returned from the war, older now and irrevocably changed. 

"More ridiculous than running away and never having the fucking nerve to write so much as one letter to explain?!" your voice was higher, louder than you had expected, thick with furious emotion that threatened to overwhelm you as you stood so close to him, throwing your hands up as you shouted. You took a moment to breathe, in then out, then turned to him slowly, words appearing in your head already steady and emotionless, the worst things you could think and you knew you had to say them now or else you'd see them every time you closed your eyes, taunting and true. "You know, I thought you were a fool, but I never took you to be a coward." 

He straightened, squaring up and his jaw locking, and in that moment the last shred of the man you had loved finally fell away, and in the man it left behind you wondered how many people he had killed. He had that easy malice that made you think he'd lost count. "Watch it." 

"Or what? Far as I've gathered, you don't care about me at all. Don't see why we should change that, now should we?" you were taunting him now, stepping closer to hiss it against the hot skin of his throat and you could still see the faint lines of scars you'd dressed, out of place as though they were not his past at all, stolen words from someone else's love-story and wasted in his tale of woe. Tommy Shelby was a poet, Thomas Shelby a murderer. 

"You shouldn't be here." he gritted his teeth, breathing out through his nose and biting back the anger that was burning through his face and fists and every cell in his body. You were so close he could almost taste the soft, sweet perfume you had always used in those empty days in the hospital when you were the only thing keeping him from going insane, his saving grace and now you were before him and against him and you had never hated him so much before. 

"Oh really? And where, pray tell, should I be? Sticking it out in an empty hospital after the war has fucking ended in the hopes that you would write so much as once?!" you tried not to cry, tried not to scream as it hit you all over again that you had stayed there, long after you could have left, could have been done with all the blood and all the torture you put up with for him. War was hell and you had walked through it gladly, past turning back, past reason, because once he'd asked you to and now he only left you there to burn. You stepped back, pushing him hard with one hand and he caught you by the wrist, holding you in place, feeling your heart beating strong and fast and knowing you were real. 

"It's not fucking safe here." he muttered under his breath and you wrenched your hand away, turning around and grinning like a madman, all your anger, all the rage that had been boiling in you for all these months alone finally rushing up through your head and into your mouth, thick and sour and burning like the hot summer sun inside you. 

"I was in a fucking war! Don't you fucking dare tell me what's safe and what isn't!" now you were screaming, shoving him and swearing like the rest of the house couldn't hear you, or simply didn't matter. All that was gone now, only you and him and how much you could hurt him before he would push back. You couldn't help but think of when you'd loved him endlessly, you and him and, far away, the nurses knowing nothing, and now there was only hate. 

"Oh you were in the war, were you?!" and he was angry, angrier than you had seen him, even in those days when vengeful fate was crushing his broken body in the hospital bed a million miles away. He was burning, the fire behind his eyes brighter than you had ever seen it before, and you wondered if he had ever loved so furiously, so strong it brought the gods to tears and how beautiful he might have been if he had had a heart at all. "Funny, as far as I could see you were just some middle-class university girl playing at doctors and pretending she wasn't just kidding herself she was actually important to someone!" 

And then the silence, the awful waiting as you looked at him, tried not to cry as the tears welled in your eyes and he had never been so lovely as he was when you could not see him at all. In the blur of all the pain he sent your way, you could almost kid yourself he was the man you'd thought he'd been. But he was ruthless, he was cold, and you saw it in his eyes that all those medals, all the stories, had made a sense you'd never seen before. The war was won by men like him and all the awful things they did. 

"Get out." you could not find the voice within you that you had had before, only the hoarse whisper that shook and broke with that sad hate that you thought would last forever. 

"It's my fucking pub!" he threw up his hands. You stood still another moment, breathing deep and shaking with the rage that coursed through you, livid as the summer heat and bright as all those nights alone when you wondered if you would ever see him again. You almost wished you hadn't. 

"If I ever see you again, I'll fucking kill you, Thomas Shelby." You reached for the frame of the open door, looking out into the street as you heard him laugh, insidious and dreadful as the winter creeping in, behind you in the pub. Your voice was steady, your words heavy with a truth that both of you could see, and there was not a part of you that doubted that you would, you really would. This town had got to you, and you were not like you were before. Things were so very different. You couldn't help but take one last look at him, praying that he could see what he had made of you and knowing he had eyes only for himself. 

"If you think I'm coming after you then you're very much mistaken, (Y/N) (Y/L/N)." and there was that emptiness in his eyes that made you think you weren't going to see him again, and you were just fine with that. 

"So dark and brooding. You know, I think I might have loved you for that. But now? Right now I just think you're pathetic. Someday you'll come home and there'll be no one there anymore. And I think you're fucking terrified. Come after me or don't, just know I won't be waiting." the last words dropped to a choked sob, a curse upon him and upon this whole damned town, pull you together as it was always made to do. Your uncle once told you that when you loved someone, really loved them, every road would lead you back to them, and now all you wanted to do was set fire to every last brick until the whole city went up in flames. If your fate was written, so help you you would find the book and not rest until you had pulled each last word from its cruel pages. 

As you stormed out of the Garrison, teeth gritted to try and stifle the tears that pricked at your eyes, you slammed into someone. Apologising and trying to make them out through teary eyes, all you could see was a smudge of blonde hair, a slim figure and a pretty green dress. You rolled your eyes and slid past her. You had spent too long in the neighbourhood to ask her what she was doing here. You thought you'd rather not know. 

You didn't entirely know where your footsteps were leading you - not to the church, with its false pity and God still falser, the secrets in the crypts that whispered to you your life was empty, loveless. Nor to the bakery, with your aunt's loving arms and the hatred you would leave at the door. You didn't want to leave it; you wanted to feel it coursing in your blood, hot and true like nothing you had felt for months. It was only when your world came whirling in a rush that you knew it turned at all, and it was only when your heart was pulsing to explode that you know it beat at all. All these months, thinking you were barely alive, but now you knew. You were, and you would remain forever, very much alive and very vengeful indeed. 

________________________________________________________________________________

Without knowing it entirely, your footsteps lead instead to the Cut, the abandoned warehouses where you had used to hide in years gone by, waiting excitedly for your aunt and uncle as they came home from work in the early evening, baskets of bread and sweets for you as you ran out into their arms. Sitting on the riverbank, looking down into the distorted reflection of your face upon the water, you wondered if you could close your eyes and have it all gone. You had never asked for this, you had never wanted this. Boys, men, the endless heat of this godforsaken city, a grim horizon that you had never seen looming before you, and now here you were at the ends of the world as you knew it and you had nowhere left to go. Leave the town and leave it all unfinished the way you swore you never would again, or stay and fight and know that nothing would ever be quite as good as it was in that other, sweeter, eternity. 

The water-line was low, and you slipped off your shoes and stockings, dipping your legs into the river as you shook your hair out of its plait and breathed out. It was calm here, calmer than anything else in this tumultuous city where every silence carried a hundred thousand words you couldn't begin to understand. France was simple, but France was far away, and you knew there was more than just a sea between you now. 

You weren't going to cry - not here, not in front of all the world you could not see, waiting in the dockyards because work never stopped in this city of dust and ashes. Instead you threw a stone at the gentle grey water, felt the cool splash against your burning skin, tried to breathe when screaming came so easy, blinked and blinked again as your vision swam in watery uncertainty, felt the emotion draining out of you and fading away into the heat all around. You weren't prepared for this, any of this. 

It was childish to expect that nothing would have changed, that you would come back and everything would be the way he had promised it would be from the window of the train as it carried him away. War was nothing more than a bleak and empty promise by men who knew no better way to kid themselves that they would be just fine, and his words could do no better. But what were you meant to do when he was there and he had been so beautiful, and now all you felt was shame. You hated him for everything he said and did, hated him for leaving and for coming back and for being there at all, but most of all you hated yourself for doing what you did. You knew even then that if love were ever real in this land of hate and death, then that was and would ever be the closest you would come. 

Wrapped in your fantasies of love and life left behind, you didn't notice the footsteps behind you until they had stopped beside you on the muddy riverbank, the hem of the floral dress swirling in the gentle breeze. 

"Rough day." the soft voice you knew, the voice that had got you into this mess because you didn't know when to walk away. There was a time to be brave and a time to call it quits, and you had missed that point a long time ago. 

"Jesus Ada, give me some warning." you murmured, more to yourself than to her as she sat beside you. You'd known she would come after you - the whole town must know by now, a million voices in the streets with your name on everyone's lips and suddenly you knew what a fool you'd been to try and keep it secret. This was the last thing that was truly yours and now they knew, now the things you'd carried with you like the last chance you might someday get out of here, spilling out into the river as you grabbed at memories of the way he'd kissed you as he'd left you, the way he'd loved you when you'd thought he really did. This was the worst thing that could happen, and this was the way you dealt with it. You didn't think you had the life within you to run away again. 

"I was worried about yer." she was looking at you, but you couldn't quite brig yourself to meet her eyes. Beautiful eyes, so deep and brown, nothing like her brother's at all. She didn't look liker her brother: she looked kind. She looked like she cared, and you knew that was the most dangerous thing of all. 

"The whole world is worried about me." You sighed slowly, gazing out across the river at the bird wheeling around the tired beams of the warehouses not so far away. You were tired, tired of secrets and tired of your tiny little life, so big until right now. You'd spent so long thinking you'd never be big enough to fill the aching void of all the lives that you could live, and now the walls were pressing in and suddenly you were big and bad and filled with righteous anger. You were tired of Shelby's and tired of Birmingham and tired of the world beyond the grimy walls because nothing you could ever do would shout louder than the fact that even when you ran away you had never left at all. Everything you did was kept within this damned neighbourhood, and you thought it wasn't any wonder they murdered as they did, because here was Earth and here was Hell, and Heaven was not there at all. 

You chuckled bitterly, tears stinging at the back of your eyes, hot with summer rage and the aching in your hands that longed to hit him for what he had done to you and longed for the justice that would come after. The man you loved, he would kill you for sure, for these were men who ruled a world of blood and death and your sweet Tommy was their god. You curled you hand into a tight fist around the smooth rock you held, and threw it into the water just to watch it sink. 

"I didn't know." Ada's quiet voice shook you, brought you to her as it always did, and you turned to face her, to see the pity as it overwhelmed her pretty face. She pitied you, the child of pain and fate, she had seen what she had seen and she pitied you most of all, and for all these dreadful things you cried at least for that. What beautiful sins had her brother done that made her so unhappy, made him so damn cold? 

"Because I never told you." you shook your head at her. You never told her, you never told a soul, because this was yours and yours alone. Yours to dream and yours to cherish, the one last thing about this goddamn town that no one else could know, the most beautiful moments of your whole life because sometimes you could close your eyes and pretend that he didn't exist at all, that it was all inside your head and the world would never have to know. No one would ever have to know. 

"I wish yer'd told me. I could've-" she took your hands desperately, clasping them between her own and begging you, scanning you over like she had never known you at all. You wondered if she really blamed you for never telling her about you, about her brother. She didn't, she wouldn't; she had her secrets and you had yours and the rest of the world had its own, and no one seemed to know anyone these days. Not really, not anymore. 

"The damage is done. There's nothing left to say." you slipped your hands out of her hands, smiled at her sadly as she grasped at words to say. There were no words to say, you'd said them all. Your words were crashing in the main room of the Garrison, filling the air until there was not air to breathe, and here the world was empty and you thought she might just catch a glimpse of your darkest soul if she looked hard enough, if she were looking hard enough. With shaking hands you took a cigarette out of your pocket, lit it and took a deep pull and passed it to her, lighting another for yourself. 

"You 'aven't said anything at all." she pressed, and you knew she wanted to know a little more, and you also knew she deserved to know a lot more, but truly you weren't ready. She deserved the truth but no one got the truth, not when lies were so much more beautiful and so much more kind. The truth was only for those who had the wealth and confidence to not care what the truth was at all, for soldiers in the trenches and for politicians in their stony towers. It was 1919 and the truth was obsolete. 

"I don't think I ever will." your voice was dreamy, and your heart far away. You thought you might have dropped it somewhere in the river that last morning, poured it into your coffee and left it there in the square as his face was already fading. What need had you of a heart if he would not let you love him as you did, if he tore it out and left you bleeding every time he looked your way with those cold dead eyes you loved more than life. There were no words to describe Tommy Shelby, and no feelings with which to do him justice, and even now your petty anger paled before him. It was like shooting at the tides and trying to stop them coming back and back and back to pull you out to sea. At this you drew your legs up out of the water, pulling your knees up to your chest and wrapping your arms around yourself, a little colder than before, despite the bright heat of the morning, a little less certain. You turned away again and blew a trail of soft, sad smoke over the water, and for a long moment there was only the silence of the river and the secrets in between. 

"You loved him, didn't yer." It was quiet, almost not there at all, and you caught it through the lull of the water like the whisper of some dream slipping past you as you woke, and like a dream it stopped you in your thoughts, wrapping around your throat and keeping you from saying what you wanted to say. No, of course not. A summer fling, but it had lasted so much more than just one summer. A handful of months, a short eternity, and you thought you might have loved him all your life if you had only known his name. Certainly you had loved him since the moment he had smiled at you, the moment you had seen his eyes, the moment you had left him. You had fallen in love with him a million times, and you had loved him a little more every time. 

"Who can ever say. I went to war, Ada. I did what soldiers do. I do what I do to keep myself alive." He kept you sane every single day, he saved you every time you saw his face. He had saved so many, and you had let him save you too, and that was all there was to say. And suddenly you were wondering if all the others fell so sweet, all those pretty girls and angels who he'd write to every day, he promised. You wondered how many knew he never would, and if it made any difference to them. You wished more than anything that you could be the sort of girl who kissed and never told, who could turn around and walk away with all your heart inside of your chest instead of leaving little shattered pieces along the way. Memories of you and him that you thought you must have dreamed up in your lonely mind, because you knew at least he didn't love you know. 

"Are you alive?" she frowned at you and you really didn't know what to say. You'd stopped being alive a long time ago, and Tommy Shelby had absolutely nothing to do with it. They used to tell you that it was all some grim lottery, that some would die and some would live and some would spend the rest of their life dying, but no one survived this bloody war, only the horses. Who lived, who died, and everyone died and such was the world and such was the war and such would it always be. There'd be another war and more people would die and you would go on breathing and you'd like it a little less every day, because that was the way you did things when you were only made to die and all the world lived on alone. 

"Are you?" you quipped back and put out your cigarette on the jagged stone that jutted out over the river, a road of stone but mostly dirt, tied with blood that ran like veins down the streets, the silvery threads of Tommy Shelby's spiderweb of crime. You turned to her and saw her breathe in and out - how nice to say that she was human when all you were was this tangled mass of broken bones and no soul left at all - and rested your hand on her shoulder to take in all the pallid skin, the emptiness behind. You felt the need to feel every inch of her and know that she was not a name like that sad boy you'd tried to love, she was yours, forever and ever and always, and she wasn't going anywhere. 

"Doesn't matter about me right now, does it." she took a piece of your hair and twirled it in her fingers, leaning your forehead against hers and sighing against your skin, so close that you could taste the sweet perfume on her neck and the smoke that lingered on her tongue, like waking up beside her and knowing she was yours. "I should've told yer. Might've saved us all this trouble." 

"It's not your job to keep your brothers in line, Ada." you placed your hand over hers, You were right: it wasn't her job. It was her job to find a nice boy, an honest boy with no blood on his hands, and fall in love with him and get married and get away from here, because no one else seemed to do that here. Something about her told you that she would be the first to have all this and more, and something else told you that she already had. Not for the first time you had the unmistakable feeling that there was so much in her you didn't know. "I appreciate the effort, but I made this mistake. I think I have to figure this one out myself." 

"I'm here." she squeezed your hand, twining her fingers with yours and bringing your hand down to your lap. She pulled away a little to look into your eyes, send you a sympathetic gaze that meant nothing more than she would be here when all the world had burned away and nothing else was certain, because she knew that you would do the same, no matter what you did, no matter what her brother had done. 

"I wouldn't have it any other way." you grinned lopsidedly at her, taking the chance to stand up and pull her up beside you, smoothing down her dress and leading you down the alleyway with a hand on the small of your back. 

"At least let me bring you to the Garrison. Meet the rest of the family, make sure there 'en't any other nasty surprises, eh?" she gave you those big brown eyes that she knew made you melt, and you sighed dramatically, already knowing that you would give in. 

"Fine. Just a drink, mind. Think I've 'ad enough of boys for just about the rest of my life." you rubbed your eyes wearily, half to make her laugh and the other half to make her look away from the bright tears that had not quite gone away since the moment you sat down, brushing them away quickly as if you thought she couldn't see them. She caught your hand, swinging it in hers and pressing a short kiss against the back laughingly. Check one, see you cry. You realised that it had been the first time. You realised how drastically okay it felt.

And there she went ahead of you, and your hand was in her hand, and it was enough to make any pretty girl forget the world of Tommy Shelby, but not you. Not you.


	7. Chapter 7 - On Comforting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... it's been a year. 
> 
> I have nothing to say for myself.   
(Not entirely true. I now think I'm a lesbian, not bi?? It probably won't affect my fics, because I don't think I even found Tommy that attractive in the first place lol, I just respect the vibes. It will mean there'll be a 30% increase in me simping over Ada, but apparently you're all here for that.)

You supposed you should have known from the moment the shape of the Garrison appeared in front of you, that you were once more part of some ill-boding scheme of the Shelby family, as you had been so many times before. The time Ada had you sneak alcohol out of the back of the church to take to the river and stay out through the night together and your father had found you out. Of course he had, the man saw more than ever, as though he had the eyes of God within his restless soul, scouring the streets for the evil that roamed freely in the night. Ada had insisted that it was worth it, and you had supposed it was, although you weren't quite so sure the next morning. 

In this town it was as though you had never grown up at all, because no one grew older here, and no one grew any wiser than the day they had left to die and come back dead entirely. 

No one grew at all, despite the darkness in your soul and the stiffness in your bones from days and nights unsleeping to watch the war pass before your eyes a million times like the hellish fate to which you would return when all of this is over. You had lived a thousand lives and died more times still, you had seen the worst of the universe all in one bloody room, and you were still no more than the lonely teenager you were when you had left this world behind with your future in front of you and no idea of what you were about to live through. You had lived through it, you had survived, and now you had your childhood and you had Ada, and you had all night to make all the mistakes you should have learned to make so many years ago. 

And here you were again, with her in hand and going back into that very room where not even an hour ago you had left your heart completely, not broken but fractured, not ended but changed. You could see the faint shadows of people moving around in the bar through the frosted windows, the sound of laughter and chatter spilling out onto the street, and you basked in the knowledge that in there you were no one at all, so much more and so much less than the little girl who Tommy Shelby had left in France to live a life alone without him. You were so much more than another's story, another's history, and you were an empty sheet of paper to write in the sea of other watchful faces. 

You gave it a day, maybe two if you were very lucky, before the whole town knew all about where you'd been, what you'd done, who you'd done. There was nothing you could do to stop the tides of unkind fate, carrying your stories out to sea as far as the wheeling birds could catch the words upon the water and revel at your tragedy. Take tonight, take one last look, remember the way they looked at you when you were a world away from the dreadful Shelby's, when you were the girl they thought they once knew, because tomorrow all this would be over and you would be standing once more in the rubble of the world you knew and the world you did not, and all would be so strange. 

You hadn't realised Ada had let go of your hand until you were standing before the Garrison door, looking on at the wood and the way your thoughts played in the afternoon sunlight, standing still and she had long since gone inside. With a deep breath in and a sigh to build up all the strength you could find within you, you pushed open the door and went inside to find her. 

It was early afternoon, but already the pub was busy with a small crowd of people sitting in the booths or at the bar with their large drinks and loud babble, or standing against the walls and hushing up their words behind their whiskey-glasses. Pressing on a short smile and pushing through the people that stood before you, you scanned the room for the bright brown bob and pretty floral dress, winding your way round and round in a labyrinth of circles as you met face after face you didn't know. Where was she? 

After a moment the conversation lulled enough for you to hear her burst of laughter, loud and raucous, in a booth near the corner. Making your way over, you found her next to John, surrounded by various men and one who could not be much more than a boy. You raised an eyebrow at her, nodding awkwardly as their eyes landed on you. John stood to kiss you on the cheek, whispering a "Good luck" in your ear that only made you infinitely more nervous. You bit your lip and turned to Ada with a silent plea in your eyes. 

"(Y/N), may I," she took a long gulp of the man next to her's beer and stood with a slight sway, gesturing at the men around the table, "introduce you to the Shelby's." 

"Hi." the man beside her stood quickly, touching the brim of his cap, ever careful to avoid the thin line of glittering silver that caught your eye once again. Now that you were looking for it, you could see Ada's kindness in his deep brown eyes, the broad moustache on his upper lip not enough to conceal the twitch in his mouth that reminded you of John. And then the jawline and the dark circles under his eyes, the shaking hands, just like another Shelby you knew and wished you didn't. He had the restlessness of a soldier and an addict, someone who had survived a war doing whatever he could and couldn't do, and had come back to find another waiting. He had the look of a man whom the world had broken, and the sweetness of a man you could trust, as though you hadn't learned at all from Him, the great and terrible Thomas. 

"Arthur." You were shaken from your observations by his rough, low voice, and you wondered if he knew that you were reading him, trying to make up your mind about what sort of life this man had had before. 

"(Y/N)." you murmured, a little embarrassed as he smirked at you beneath his great moustache, and you knew he had caught you staring. John, standing just behind him, was having the time of his life watching the awkward exchange. 

"Lovely name." he looked at you with kind eyes that knew about his brother, knew more than he would say because it was the one thing that filled the large booth, the name you didn't dare to say out loud for fear of someone hearing you and saying just how sorry they were. 

"Yeah, exactly like I said it a minute ago if you'd actually been listenin' to me." Ada huffed, dragging you back to her and handing you a glass of whiskey like every time the two of you had stayed up late in the Garrison, drinking and talking and being alive. You laughed at her and held her hand in your own and she gave you a bittersweet smile that only made you think of him. You looked away as fast as you could but still it burned in your mind, in the darkness when you blinked and you could swear you could see him really there in front of you with his damned blue eyes and the sweetness of the way he lied to you like he was breathing. You wondered if he had known truth at all, and if he had known anything other than himself. 

"Ada tells me you work for the bakery." he shifted on his heels, and you thought he might have been high already; you wouldn't blame him. These days all there was to do was sit around and try and forget what you had been through, wherever you knew how. These days whiskey flowed like blood and blood like water and water like the tears of God's broken soul somewhere a long long way ago. 

"Yeah, do what I can and all that." you shrugged, glancing up at him over the chipped rim of your raised glass and knowing that he had heard the words a thousand times before from smart men and women who had nothing else to do with their lives than to waste it running off to pretend they could save the world by hurting and bleeding enough. The world was never saved by blood, but nor was it ever ended by it either. The irony was this: that it ended as it began, with an officeful of men in smart suits and a pen that killed more any mortal weapon. Bang, crash, smoke, and those words had killed them all. 

"Always jobs in the Shelby household. Lots to be done, could use a smart lass like you." his words were laden with the genuine curiosity that you had been expecting since the moment you had seen his face. There was that respect, the respect of a businessman making a deal, a man with a plan and the means to see it through no matter what. Arthur Shelby wanted you in the business, and you got the feeling he was not used to being told no. 

"I'm sure you could. Think I might be sticking to the more... legal side of work in Small Heath." you didn't know you had been thinking it until it slipped out of your mouth, and you immediately wished it hadn't. There had to be a rule somewhere that you don't get killed on the same day you get your heart broken, but it seemed that that was exactly what you were going for. You thought you both knew it then, that it was not the crime nor the blood nor the sin at all that made you shy away and wish you were talking to anyone else in the room all of a sudden, it was Him. The looming shadow cast over the shoulders of his brothers, far from the room as he might be. The infamous Tommy Shelby who all the ladies loved but you, who was good enough for all of Birmingham but no one was ever good enough for him. You thought if you took the job and saw him here every day with his pretty blonde girlfriend you might just kill him yourself. 

"As you will. Think it through, eh? At least come for tea some time." he wasn't joking but his smile was wide and kind and it reminded you somewhat of John, only with a frantic craze of emotion behind it that made you wary. Men who had gone away and come back with heart and soul unsullied were the men who scared you all the more, for they had seen what they had seen and it had been no darker than what they saw inside them when they closed their eyes at night, and the anger in Arthur's soul warned you that he watched a million lives ending in glorious technicolour every second when he blinked. 

"She's been coming for tea for the last five months, Arthur!" Ada piped up in the background, laughing over her shoulder as the broad man beside her slipped an arm around her waist and lead her back to the wall a little way away. You stifled a giggle at the way Arthur's eyebrows rose up almost to his hairline, his wide eyes a brown-black that wasn't a colour at all, just the lifeless reflection of feelings to strong to be kept inside. It was really rather enthralling. 

"Never saw you before." he mumbled by way of an apology. A Shelby apology, where you found yourself wondering if it were somehow your own fault.

"Had to keep her a secret from you all, didn't I." Ada had turned to you again, and her partner let out a loud and exasperated groan that only made her move further away from his hands around her waist. She waved a accusatory finger at the boys around you, a little too tipsy to be taken entirely seriously but enough to make them all quieten slightly. You always underestimated that strange power she had on people when her softness made them all back down. You sometimes thought she might be the most dangerous of them all. "Else you'd all be taking her away from me, and I can't let that happen." 

"Not gonna happen, Ada. You know I'm all yours." you flirted, tangling her outstretched hand in yours and grinning lovingly at her. All dreamy smile and soft, expressive eyes, and everyone could see just how far into her dark spiderweb life you were. 

"Then by all means come for tea more often, just can't talk to anyone else but me." she whispered close to your ear, squeezing your hand and then letting it drop as she rocked back into her chair. 

"So gracious." rolling your eyes at her, you took a long sip of your whiskey, the liquid burning down your throat like fire and venom and filling your stomach with a heat that came at least not from the anger that still bubbled in your heart. 

"I know." she laughed, turning back to the man who had grown somewhat dejected as her interest wavered from him, and Arthur brought your eyes back to him as he took the empty glass from your hand. You had to admit you could feel the hot eyes of the other men in the bar on your back, burning holes in the thin cotton of your summer dress like you had known it so many nights before in this furious summer with Ada, the new men every night that never caused you half so much trouble as Tommy Shelby. Ada had a habit of making every man who saw her fall madly in love with her, and you were little better you supposed. The way they looked at you was enough to make you sick on weaker days, but on days like these when the sun was little more than the light to guide you in by, the Garrison too small to hold all the nothingness pounding in your heart, you could almost find it comforting to think of all the men who wanted something Tommy Shelby had just thrown away. And yet you would still give it all to see again the sunlight in his eyes, and that sad way he smiled. 

"You should drop by. See the business." Arthur sidled up closer to you, shooting a warning glare at a man who had stumbled over in your direction and scanning the room distractedly. 

"Careful, or I just might take you up on that offer." You had seen the way he defended you, a little brotherly and a little dangerous, and you had to admit you were almost thankful for the way his name seemed to shake men to their boots, the influence he had on the sleazy population and the men you tried endlessly to keep away. There must be some perks to being a Shelby or to having Shelby friends, and you would be an idiot not to at least consider them. Even Ada seemed to send men shaking their heads and people moving out of her way in the streets. Just imagine what you could do with all of them behind you. You thought you might sleep a little easier at night if you had at least that to keep you safe, and where was the harm in that. And Arthur was nice, and honest, and exciting, and you knew that he could kill you in a second if he wanted to but something told you there was not a part of him that wanted to. Tommy kept you guessing, he was a mystery and a mistake, but even now you could tell that what you saw in Arthur was what you got, and it made you trust him all the more. And wasn't it the final quip, the last word in this dreadful war of what you could say to hurt the other more, to be around Tommy all the more and let him know that you couldn't stand him, couldn't see him. To love his family and his town and all the things he did, and never once to love him. 

So you said it with a short glance up at Arthur and you knew that he had noticed, a little drunk as he was. Your words didn't mean nothing, and you would indeed be just passing by sooner rather than later. Behind the rim of his raised glass you thought you saw him smile. 

In the short silence that followed, the boyish man beside Arthur had risen, and you turned to greet him politely. He was a little shorter than the others at the table, his cheeks littered with light freckles and his eyes bright and glittering in the lamplight like the crystal glasses sat before him. He looked so young, no more than sixteen, and you tried not to imagine Tommy so young. It would only hurt you if you knew that he was human, because he had never been human to you. He had been an angel, and he had been cold and cruel and robotic, and he had never seen fit to show you his humanity. 

"Finn." he sounded young too, excited by life and excited by being in the bar, unsullied by the bloodied streets of Small Heath in a way that you knew he could not be forever. Soon, very soon, there would be another Shelby on the streets, and you thought you would not like to see it. "You're Ada's secret, aren't you." 

You had to raise an eyebrow at that. Sure the two of you had been sneaking around, sometimes with John when it was dark and you were in the alleys, but mostly just you two against the world, a sisterhood of broken homes and the unbreakable bond of spilled blood between you. 

"That so?" you couldn't quite figure out the tone in his voice as he said it - something sharp and exhilarating, between curiosity and jealousy and concern and pity - and you thought you'd rather like to know. You were beginning to think there was very little about the entire Shelby family that was not wrapped in mystery, guarded with a life other than their own. 

"Only that she never talks too much of you. Likes to keep you away from us, 's all." Finn glanced over at Ada before he said it, making sure she was too deep in conversation with her man to listen to his hushed words, and you wondered what it was she would make of it when you told her later that night as you knew you would. You told each other everything (nearly everything, as you had learned to night, and everything that was not important. Your lives were a million miles apart, yet sometimes in those late nights in your bedroom, sitting on the windowsill with the duvet wrapped around you two and smoking into the gloom of inferno, the roads were tangled inexplicably.), and you would tell her about this too. 

"Is she so very ashamed of me, Finn Shelby?" you teased him, but his eyes grew wide and he babbled defensively. 

"No, no, of course not, I just meant-" quickly, and growing more and more flustered as you let him flounder on his own for a minute. Sure, it was a little cruel of you, but it was fun to watch him panic too, and this Shelby seemed a little less worrisome than the others. You were almost relaxing in his presence, except that you weren't. 

"I was joking. I know her, she's a good girl." your eyes had wandered back to Ada in her dress, chatting up the man at the bar with his sharp suit and no cap to be seen. There was a bittersweet sadness there, and you knew that she had never looked the way of a man who wore a silver cap, and you knew exactly why now. It was something else you shared in silent - the Shelby boys had broken your heart, and you were all the worse for wanting them. You wondered still what drove a man to hurt his sister, to break her heart so young, and once again the answer would not come. 

"The rest of us are too, y'know. Good gir- men. Men." Finn was still talking in the background, and you laughed weakly at the appropriate times, eyes not leaving Ada. You wondered when you could go home, and if she would be going home with you at all. You thought the man looked mighty interested in her, or rather in the way her thighs showed when she sat the way she did, so close to him. It was almost enough to make you rethink all those late nights in your bedroom and the way she felt against you, almost enough to make you think that you could kid yourself you loved her and let her break your heart too, just to know that it was still there to break at all. If you were not breathing and standing, living, where you were, you might have thought you had no heart at all. You were sure that that was what Tommy had thought. 

The door slammed open, you stepped quickly behind Arthur and stole a glance at the men bursting into the pub. Smaller, like Finn. Not Tommy. You breathed out. They were making their way over to your booth, wielding caps like broken swords of glory, drunk already off the taste of blood and reigning over these miserable streets, and you could see them stepping of the train from France as beautiful as today. Each day the war ended for them, each day they came back in triumph. You didn't want to see them when it began again each morning. 

"Ada's friend." Arthur crowed, resting his arm around your shoulders and jostling you forward into the group of men with brotherly pride. There was nothing uncomfortable in the way his hands, hands with scars that screamed of murder and of things much darker still, hands that knew the body from the bedroom to the tomb, hands that had moved people to both, toyed with the fabric of your dress, running along the seams as he laughed at something one of the men had said (not about you, that would come in a minute when they had lost their sense of jubilant arrival and noticed that you too were here). You felt, strangely, almost reassured. 

"(Y/N)." you explained, taking in the faces in the crowd as the men drifted away into the pub, one by one by one to their whiskey and their women. The way your night should have gone, sidetracked by the one encounter that had shaken you entirely, and once again you searched the room to make sure he was not here. 

You saw only the crowd that by now filled the room until you were sick to bursting of the cheap cologne and bloodied suits that met you wherever you turned to breathe. And then your eyes found him, the face you thought you knew from somewhere dark and blurry in your mind, another life gone and almost forgotten until you saw him and it all came flooding back. 

"Isaiah Jesus?" you couldn't help but stare at the boy in front of you, taller, a little more handsome and a whole lot more confident than the last time you had seen him. You were trying to push away the memory of the last time you had seen him, in the back-rooms of the church where you had told him you had to go, because Kent was looming and medical school was so much bigger and grander than anything in this small town for you. Prettier than him, and you knew it as you had kissed him for what you both knew was the last time, the last of a summer fling which you had all but left behind you. Prettier than him, and now you knew it had turned so ugly, so painful, that you wondered why you had left him at all. True you did not love him (perhaps you might have some long time ago, but now when you looked at him there was only the shadow of a childhood friend in the shadows on his face) but even that, the not loving, the lying and the cheating that the Peaky's did so well, could any of it have been so bad as the blood and death and love you'd left behind you in the darkness of your history? 

"The very same." he turned to look you over, and you grinned as the look of shock washed over his face. "(Y/N) (Y/L/N)! Didn't think I'd see you back so soon? Miss me all that much?" 

"Don't make me laugh. Didn't think I'd see you in here either, Jesus. What happened to the church, eh?" you grabbed the cap from off his head, settling in on your own and frowning at the stiffness in the brim, the little extra weight in the front that made your mind race with dreadful curiosity. 

"Wasn't my style, love. Was always more of the... hands-on type." you grimaced at the euphemism, knowing (and thanking the Lord) that he wouldn't say anything more for fear of driving you away. By the way your day had gone, you thought it might well drive you away as he so feared. You'd had enough of the violence for one day. "But you, you and yer medicine, now that was something I never saw coming." he shook his head thoughtfully, staring at you like he was trying to look into your soul. You knew full well he couldn't - Isaiah was Isaiah, funny and honest and sometimes a little kind too, but Isaiah had never been very good at reading your mind, and you knew the years away had done anything but help. 

"What, didn't think I'd make a good doctor?" you joked. 

Of course he didn't, looking back it was easy to see that you were never the right sort. You went to war, a scared little girl that had a soul like snow, meek and childish and waiting to bear all the sins of the world that you would see. The blood had fallen deeper than your skin, your hands gone past their injuries to pull apart the emptiness beneath and try and make it fit within your own. How could you ever be a doctor when every man you tried to save just made you more and more sick. 

"Thought you'd make an excellent doctor, love. Just didn't think you'd be coming back when you left us all here." you knew he wished you hadn't.

"Aye, but here we are all the same." the way it came out, you thought the whole room could hear your heart breaking, but it had broken many times since this morning when you woke up, and every time you were becoming just a little more human. 

"And it is good to have you back again. I know people must be saying a lot about it." he took a step closer, looking down at you softly like all those times before when you were just kids messing round in the church and pretending you knew how to love anything at all. Taking a drink from a man who had been walking by, he waved the other men along until it was just you two, standing alone against the wall in a room full of people. Like all those days when you thought there was a world out there bigger than you could ever be. 

"You wouldn't believe." you rolled your eyes, following the way the crowds swirled and shifted with the steady stream of people filtering in through the doors. Faces you knew; you smiled to them tightly as they passed and they looked quickly away from the Blinder by your side. You wondered what they'd say when they knew. You wondered what Isaiah would say. "And how is the great Isaiah now that he's turned to other forms of work?" 

"Oh I'm grand. You won't believe the things we do now there's no one who can stop us. You" he downed his drink in one long gulp and pointed a slightly drifting finger at you. Isaiah had always been a bit of a lightweight when you had known him, and it was vaguely comforting to see that even now he was having trouble after his second whiskey, "should come along sometime. Get a real feel of the place." 

"Think maybe I've felt enough." you shuddered involuntarily at the thought of more dark nights in these grim streets where blood and water ran side by side under the shadows of cold summer rains and the sins they washed away. "Thanks for the offer, Jesus, but think I might be staying in for a bit more." you patted his arm kindly and tried to let him know that though your heart and head were sadder than he could ever understand, there was a bittersweet gladness in you that he was here again, the only thing that hadn't changed in all that time you were away; the only thing you knew for sure. 

"Bad break-up?" he piped up through the thoughts that hung around you both like a heavy mist of gloom. There were no feelings left unsaid between you two - you had made very sure of that when you had gone away, the tears in his eyes enough to burn a hole in all the thousand memories of the town as you left it on your way to somewhere better which in the end was no better at all - still you thought he could see that there were things you would not tell him just yet, only just now reunited as you were. 

"You haven't heard the half of it." you laughed weakly and taking another drink from Arthur as he sidled up to the two of you, girl in hand. What would Tommy say - he had always seemed so honest and true, but now you couldn't shake the image of him and the pretty blonde from earlier standing as close together as Arthur with his girl and John with one of many of tonight's conquests. You knew John, you could not blame him, and besides it was just his way. He loved to be loved, and you couldn't not deny him that. But you also could not deny that you would give anything to be the girl that Tommy sat next to night after night. Not her, never her. She would never know what you had seen of Tommy, and she would never see it too, the thought alone gave you some small comfort. 

"Then forget him. Sounds like a right tosser. Ditch the boy and have a drink with us, eh? Just like old times." Isaiah shoved you playfully and you knocked into Arthur, mumbling a short apology and glaring back at Isaiah with only love in your eyes. Thank you for being here. I don't know what I'd do without you. 

"I have work tomorrow." it was a lame excuse, yet another way to try and get yourself out of here and back to the church because all of a sudden every face you saw in the crowd looked for all the world like Tommy's, every laugh like the laughter you had pressed from him in those happier days when he still smiled like he hadn't this afternoon. 

"You told Ada you'd come, didn't you?" Isaiah pressed you to stay, smirking at a girl across the room distractedly and you sighed heavily. The events of the day were fast flooding through you, shaking you to the bone as it all became more and more real by the minute, and right now you wanted nothing more than some fresh air and solitude to let it all pass you by. Perhaps it was better for everyone if you just left. 

"Yeah, for one drink. I've had my drink, think I'd rather just be off." you pushed up off the wall and searched the crowd for Ada to tell her her you were leaving but she was nowhere to be found. You knew better than to look for her and get lost in the backrooms where you had never gone before. Somehow you had never got around to finding out what went on exactly behind those closed doors, and now you knew it was only Tommy, sitting at a disk like a man who said the war was a noble thing. So far from the little broken man in the hospital who said that war was hell. So far from your sweet, sad lover. 

"(Y/N)..." Isaiah ran his fingers over the bumps of jutting bones on your wrist, a world of pity in his eyes that you had not noticed there before. You were so much thinner than you had been when you had left Small Heath, and gone was that baby fat that even in your teenage years softened the harsh lines of no food and no sleep that now cut you up into a sharp outline of a human being. The war had changed you, inside and out, and the pain was hard to hide. 

"Some other time, Isaiah. Just not tonight." and you both knew it wouldn't be tomorrow either, or the day after, or the day after that. You were tired, so very, very tired, and you thought you would be tired forever. Of Tommy Shelby and of Small Heath, and of the way you never seemed to fit the way you probably should. This was your home, so why did you feel so out of place? 

"Let me walk you home, at least." he pleaded half-heartedly and his eyes were filled with worry. You thought you could see in them some semblance of the sweet little boy he had been when the two of you owned the world, and you wished you could make it stay somehow. Damn the war and damn Tommy Shelby for making monsters of these men and for making a fool of you. 

"Isaiah, you just got here!" you laughed weakly and then, a little quieter and a little sadder still, "I don't want to ruin your night." 

"You can't possibly ruin my night." he sighed dramatically as you shook your head and made to protest, cutting you off before you had time to tell him no again, "Then if not me, at least walk with one of the men." 

"You're not gonna let me say no, are you." 

"Absolutely not. Here." he set down his glass quickly and waved over a man who stood some way behind him. Through the crowds and the smoke and the shadows that played upon the walls, shading you in their cool semi-darkness, you couldn't quite make him out completely. When you looked him over you caught only that he was not quite as tall as all the men around him, and he stood like he had something to hide. "Michael, (Y/N). (Y/N), Michael. He can walk you. I trust him with- well, maybe not my life exactly, but someone else's life. On a good day." 

"And I mean so much to you." you rolled your eyes at him again and he grinned as though at last you had found some familiar footing, something that you could salvage from the wreckage of your bombed-out lives that the war had taken from you both. 

"For old times' sake, eh?" he rested his hand lightly on your arm and you tried to play off the way your heart ached at his words. You had history and it had ended so tragically, and here he was trying to pick up where you left off when you both knew that all the world had ended since then. 

"I hope you know there's absolutely no way we're doing that again." you joked, but there was a heaviness in your voice that let him know that you had loved enough since him to never love again, that your heart was utterly broken and that he stood no chance. 

"Oh I wouldn't dream of it." you let out a deep breath at that. At least you had one thing you knew for sure, for Isaiah at least had never lied to you. 

"Then I suppose this is good night." you stepped past him, stopping to take his hand off your arm and squeeze it tight before you let it go. "Good night Isaiah. It's good to see you again." 

And then you were off, through the pub and through the doors and into the late afternoon where the sun was setting over the grim grey buildings, with the elusive Michael at your heels.


	8. Chapter 8 - On Storytelling

Stopping outside the pub to breathe in the cool summer air, you let the last of the golden sunlight fall upon your closed eyes as you took a moment and then another to collect your scattered thoughts. The footsteps ringing behind you, stopping at your side, were the only sign that Michael was following, as he kept the silence and did not speak at all for a long time. 

"I suppose it's all very different." 

His voice was different to what you had imagined, although you had yet to see his face in the light. It was slow and thoughtful, and the accent was a little lighter, somewhat sharper than the drawl of all the others in Small Heath. Perhaps he had only moved here too, a stranger to this dark world of blood and gore, although perhaps he didn't mind it after all the horrors of the war gone by. 

"Yeah. Quieter. More dangerous too, but I suppose that's a given." You kept your eyes closed, holding onto the fantasy of what you might see when you opened them. Perhaps he might be handsome. But all you saw when you thought of the word was the blue of those eyes and the sharp cheekbones, the dark hair and the tight smile of the man you were trying so very hard to forget. And besides, taking a break from boys for the time being would probably be best for everyone. 

"The Peaky's weren't around when you were here?" he seemed genuinely curious. 

"Not really, no. It was always happier then, but I s'pose that might just be my memory playing tricks on me." 

The sun was already dipping behind the buildings, the town painted in soft tones of purple and pink, and you could feel the cold creeping in around the edges of your mind. Taking a long look beside you, you took in his smooth, pale skin and the mess of soft blond hair that almost covered the watercolour of purplish bruises along his cheekbone and around his eyes. Sunlight glittering in his hazel eyes, you could not deny that he was certainly beautiful. In a way that the stars are beautiful when seen from afar, and the lion in its cage that you had hung out of your window to watch pass by when you were younger and the circus passed through Small Heath on its way to somewhere bigger and more grand, beautiful and dangerous and half a world beyond your touch, the deity of some other religion that you could never see in your blind devotion to your blue-eyed God. He was beautiful in a way that made you feel nothing at all but the wonder that one feels when faced with such unattainable things, and there was not an inch of you that ached for him quite so much as you ached for Tommy even now, still the way he looked in the sunlight made your breath slow in your throat and your eyes catch on his face. He was beautiful like Ada and Isaiah and John and Arthur, and he was not a patch on your Tommy Shelby. 

"Things are always nicer when they're in the past." he was smoking, raising the cigarette to his lips and taking a long drag, the smoke wrapping around him as he breathed out, blurring his features in blue and grey. You took your eyes off him and began to walk off down the street. 

"Maybe not the war, but yeah, in a way." you joked bleakly, but he did not laugh. You got the impression that he did not laugh a lot. 

"Ada told me you served." He knew Ada. Of course he knew Ada, everyone knew Ada, Ada was the talk of the town and it was not hard to see why. Everyone loved Ada because she at least had nothing to fear, nothing to hide. Ada was the last good thing about this part of town and you thought sometimes that everyone knew it. It wasn't exactly a secret. 

"Ada likely told you a lot of things." you couldn't begin to imagine to stories she had told about you, her friend that had got out and had lived another life, the only one who ever left because no one ever left Small Heath and no one ever came back by choice, and you knew that everyone was wondering what had happened to you, and why had you come home at all, "That, though, is true." 

"Where d'you go?" 

"Flanders General. A right hell of a place, but I survived what others didn't, so I guess I'm thankful enough." 

He cocked his head, looking over at you very directly. From just the way he looked at you, you knew he knew exactly. It was hard to believe he had been to war when he was so much brighter, so much less tall and grand and intimidating to the soldier you knew in his hospital bed. But he wasn't there anymore, and you were secretly glad that he wasn't a thing like Tommy. The morning's words still rang through your head like a sucker-punch, and you could feel yourself frowning as your mind wandered back again and again to him, to Tommy. 

"That's where Tommy was, right?" Michael thought aloud, and you wondered if he knew how much it hurt you when he said his name. Of course he didn't know, and all the better that he didn't, still you wanted to tell him not to talk like that, not to bring up things that were better left unsaid. 

"Yeah." you muttered shortly, hoping against hope that he would take the hint and leave the sensitive subject alone, but now he had turned away again to gaze up at the swirling sunset sky, and lost entirely in his own distant world. 

"You saw him?" 

It was a long time before you replied, your words drawn out like they came straight of your troubled mind, and he got the sense he was hearing a lie that was so much truer than any truth you might have told him. 

"No. No, I didn't.", and maybe that was true. You didn't see him, not Tommy Shelby, not this heartless man who ran the local gang and killed like he had never known how beautiful it was to love at all. Not this man who cursed you and left you and never kept his promises; the Tommy you had known was soft and kind and perfect, the man who should never be a soldier for all the light and life behind his eyes that drew you back to his bedside day after day. If you had known the other Tommy, perhaps you might never have sat with him at all. Perhaps you might not have loved him quite so much. If you had known... You wondered what might have happened if it had been Michael instead that day in the hospital that you had been sent to see. Looking at him for a long moment, it was hard to tell whether you would have loved him too, given the time to find out. There was a part of you that warned you that you would, that you might still, that men were a dangerous game to play for a girl as weak at heart as you sometimes believed you were. And there was that part of you, a little smaller and a whole lot quieter, like even your mind was a secret to you now, that whispered that there would never be another man quite so good as Tommy Shelby once had been. That you had tasted paradise in all its earthly glory and nothing would ever be the same again. That you might like to, you might try to, fall in love again and again, with Ada and with Michael and with Isaiah Jesus as you had once before, but that nothing in this world could take you away from the endless longing in your heart that had never quite gone away since that first and last kiss on the station platform. You wondered how many lonely prophets would give their restless souls to taste their golden angels as they rained down on them from high, and none of them would ever know the way it broke your heart. 

"They say he got a medal for bravery in the Somme. Strange - never took him for the hero type." 

The Tommy from the Garrison was certainly not a hero. He had been sharp and loveless as the bullets were themselves. Perhaps this was the only Tommy that Michael knew. You tried to ignore the thorny pain that prickled around your heart. The Tommy you knew was heroic to a fault. He had heart enough for a thousand medals. Bravery so strong that it had made even you hopeful. 

"And what about you? Are you the hero type?" You tried to change the subjects, to play to his strengths. To your relief, he seemed to appreciate the chance to talk about himself. He looked on down the street as though lost in his own fantastical world. 

"I used to think I was. But then again, doesn't everyone." He grimaced, and paused. "It's only when you're out there and you're looking at it in the eye that you really see just how scared you are. Makes you a little ashamed of yourself. I thought I could make a difference until just then." 

You drifted a little closer to him in the darkening street, glad of the shadows that left the world just you and him, no others, and the conversation which was steadily carrying you away from that most awful of subjects. The two of you passed the post office and an abandoned pharmacy. 

"I think you can make a difference, just not one that matters." You meant it lightheartedly, but until he rolled his eyes and laughed you were terrified that you had read him wrong. That he would not find it reassuring at all. It was impossible to know where you stood with him. 

"Thanks." he replied sarcastically. His features flashed in golden light as you passed the lamplighter with his hands of amber blaze, leaning down from his ladder as you smiled up at him goodnight. 

"You wanted the truth." 

"I did, I'm sorry." he grabbed you by the arm and pulled you back to walk beside him and then, as you two fell back into silence and walking side-by-side. A sharp twist of wind came whistling through the street, sending a thrill up your spine as the cold grey colder and the sun had gone away, and Michael shrugged off his jacket in a single deft motion, draping it lightly over your shoulder. It was more or less the right size, thick and warm and filling your senses with the smell of his cologne in a way that made you ache for the chamomile soap in France that you had tasted every day on that other man's skin. Michael smelled of whiskey and smoke, and though it was homely and strangely comforting, you felt more alone than ever when you were wrapped in his clothes. You glanced up at him with a weak smile, all the same, and tried to find the softness in his eyes that was the kindest you had seen today, and nowhere near so quiet nor so beautiful as that sweetness you had once seen in Tommy Shelby. Perhaps it was time to let that sweetness pass you by. "You don't get that a lot around here. The truth." 

"You say that like you've seen the whole world." you looked at him for a long moment, trying to figure out where he had been, what he had seen. There was something strange about him, a story, that caught your eye and held it. Sure, he wasn't as exciting as Arthur nor as endearing as Finn, as soft and sweet as Ada or as familiar as Isaiah, and you dared not even begin to compare him to Tommy - nothing compared to Tommy Shelby, and you knew that now more than ever as all your memories rushed through your mind with every passing moment, with every breath you took with aching lungs because what was the point of breathing if it wasn't with him - but he was different and it thrilled you that there might be a world outside of this grim neighbourhood that you had yet to see and he was your way out to it. 

"Maybe I have." he smirked conspiratorially at you, as though you were beginning a conversation that no one else in the world could understand. It was not far from the truth. The rest of Small Heath had never known the world you two had seen. It made him seem all the more mad to you, for Michael had escaped this town and chosen to return. Out of everywhere in all the world, he dreamed of grey Small Heath. 

"Why did you come back? If it's alright of me to ask. Do you like it here?" you could not keep the incredulous thrill out of your voice, and he laughed shortly at you. 

"Fuck no. This place is a shit-hole, there's no actual way to escape it's mess." he kicked a stone and it skittered across the street, glancing off the curb and falling into the gutter, stained from a summer full of rain and cracked with the ghost of the sun's glare. 

"Glad someone else can see it." 

"I grew up in this dreadful little village, ages away, and I hated it, you know." his dreamy gaze was fixed on some point in the middle distance, and in his voice there was a thoughtfulness that made you think that as he spoke he was forgetting in every word that you were there at all. You felt like you were hearing some part of him that he hadn't said before, and you wondered how long it had been since he had told the truth. How sad it must be to have a story so interesting and no one ever ask for it, because a story without its audience is a fairytale lost to time, and soon your life would not be real at all. "And now suddenly I'm working for the Peaky fucking Blinders and I'm stuck in this shitty neighbourhood and no one else seems to hate it as much as I do." by the end he was grimacing tightly, his face masked with a deep, dark pain that might have looked like hatred if you were not reading him, plotting him into the map of your mind for later reference when you wanted another reminder of why you were still here. All the sadness turned to anger here, and after that to vengeance, and in the end to death and all that glory. 

And there his story ended, and you knew better than to ask more. You tried to pretend that your excitement in him was not slipping away quickly as one by one his walls built up around him again, his jaw setting tight and stern and pushing away that glimpse of humanity you were not so sure had even been there at all anymore. There you had it - he had been away and seen it all and come back here to never speak of it again - and that little stir of hope within you off the picture of another life, far away from grey Small Heath, was fading back into the darkness as you left the lamplighter behind. 

"You're a Peaky?" your voice broke a little as you prayed that he would tell you no, that he would say that you were silly, he was wrong, he was no Peaky nor a bad man either, but how could you not be bad in such a world as yours was now? This whole town seemed to be filled with them, the dreadful Peakies and their shiny caps and lifeless laws and loveless lives, and in each face and bloodied fist you saw again and again only him, only Tommy. 

"Just an accountant, really. Don't think that counts as much. Certainly doesn't to Tommy." he was venomous, bitter, and filled with a dark injustice that made you wonder what he would do if he could do anything he wanted in that moment. And for the first time you thought a silent thank you to God, to Tommy Shelby, as you thought of Michael safe within his counting-house when the others went to war. You wanted to kid yourself that he had never held a gun, never killed a man, but Shelby or not the blood still ran the same here, hot and angry and with the taste of death. 

"And all the better for it." you let out a shaky breath, not realising your fists had been clenched tight until you forced them open, rubbing at the deep crescent moons left in your palms by blunt nails. "People die here, would be a shame to lose the only other person who hasn't spent there entire fucking life within the same six streets." you were playing it safe, trying to hide the relief that flooded through you, trying to convince yourself that you were simply protective of the only other person in this entire goddamn town who was not out for more blood on their hands when the war was long since over, instead of the truth that everybody knew; that you knew now that at least you were not stepping back into the centre of the twisted web of Tommy Shelby and all the cold and bloodied hell around him. 

"Ah, don't worry about me. Think I'll be just fine." he shoved his hands into his hands, spinning on his heels to walk backwards, facing you and wearing that lazy grin that you could already tell was so utterly false. A self defence, and the eyes behind it were bright and dead and filled with pain and stories. 

"I hope so." you smiled back, mainly in solidarity. I know you're lying, but so am I. I do not care much about you, and you know very well that you will not be fine. No one is, not here. 

You walked in silence for a minute or two. You tried not to notice how Michael's eyes had drifted to rest upon your profile, and they did not look away. His watchful gaze was not dissimilar to a lab experiment that you had seen before. Hot yellow lamps glaring down upon the mice running blindly in their cage. Except for now, the mouse was you. 

"This... this is me." You waved your free hand towards the shadow of the church on the corner, resplendent in its inky darkness and the sins that seeped from the stained-glass windows and into the street. Your hand slipped out of his, falling heavily to your side as you took a step back from him. 

"Where we say our goodbyes." he murmured, and you nodded. 

"I suppose." You turned the corner, made a move to go into the church and then turned to smile at him. As you looked over, you caught him staring at you thoughtfully, a plethora of unreadable emotions dancing over his face and you wondered what on earth he was thinking now. "Thank you. For... getting me home safe." 

"I enjoyed it. A lot." he seemed as surprised as you were, when he said it, as though he had not been expecting to feel that way. And the way his face softened as he said it, the small lines by his eyes that made you think that his heart was full of quiet emotions that he would never say, it all reminded you of Tommy. 

"Would you mind if-" you began, not sure what you were saying but knowing that it was something to do with Tommy Shelby. You needed to speak to him, to have a message brought to him, that you loved him as you always had before, and that yes, you had forgiven him already for every sin in all his life. You love, love, loved him, you always had. But just as you were saying it, 

"Would you like to-" he blurted out, caught himself as both of you spoke at the same time, words blurring over each other in a tangled mass of thoughts out loud. 

"You first."

"Thank you." 

He took a deep breath in and out, still standing some way away from you as you waited by the great church doors, but now you felt as though he were close enough to hear each breath from your lips, each beat of your heart, and they were not for him. They were not for anyone other than your sweet and unattainable Tommy. 

"Would you like to go to the pictures with me. Tonight was nice." 

"Michael I-" You were surprised, to say the least. This was the last thing you had expected from him, when all of Small Heath knew by now what had gone on today. You thought the whole world must know about you and Tommy Shelby, and you thought they must love you a little less for it too. You meant nothing but trouble now, for you picked fights with people in very high places and they liked to keep their enemies very, very close. 

"Please." He took a small step towards you and you could hear the pleading desperation in his voice, a little emotion coming through, painfully honest. Shockingly honest. It was enough to make anyone give in. 

"Okay." you whispered, and you knew he had heard you. You thought that the whole world had heard you, because the words rang through your mind so loud and harsh and important, and they would stay there forever to haunt you because there it was, you had given up on Tommy Shelby. This really was the end of things. 

"Thursday? Eight o clock?" 

"I'll be here." You would, because now where else could you be. When you told Ada, she would probably tell you that it was just as well, that you should go for it, but the truth was that you didn't know how. For you had loved the greatest of all things, the most beautiful of men, and how could you ever love again? 

"Goodnight (Y/N)." he spoke softly, and you could almost hear his heartbeat through his words, quick and strong like he was full of love and life, but no one in Small Heath knew of either. He was so different to this cold, dead town. 

"Goodnight Michael." You waved at him weakly as he kept his eyes on you and took a step backwards, taking him in once more as he stood in front of you like you were trying desperately to read him one more time before he disappeared forever and became someone else entirely. The men you knew had a habit of doing that. 

"Goodnight." he smiled. 

"Goodnight." you smiled back, a little more honestly this time. 

"Goodnight." and he was still walking away, still facing you, and you thought he looked rather ridiculous but you liked it all the same, and you were wondering if perhaps it wasn't such a mistake that you and he would meet again and try to be something more. 

"I really have to go now, my father will be worried. Goodnight, I'll see you on Thursday." You promised him, already opening the church door and looking through into the impenetrable darkness beyond. 

"Thursday can't come soon enough." came ringing through the street as at last you saw him disappear around the corner, into the dark shadows of the night. You let out a long and shaky sigh. You slipped through the gap in the heavy church doors, leaning against the wood on the other side as you heard his footsteps quieten and die away as he walked away. 

"Yeah," you murmured into the shadowy silence of the church. For a moment you believed it too, letting the thought of Michael fill your mind for all the time it took to stand and begin that walk down the aisle to the anteroom door. And then the thought of Tommy came in, and flooding back, and everything was blue once more. 

________________________________________________________________________________

It was not for you to know that Tommy Shelby had waited in the shadows, standing on the corner by the darkening church as the cold and the night came creeping in around him. Not something you would look for and not something you would see, and perhaps that was why he had done it. He would like to say that someone had told him you were there at the Garrison and he wanted to make sure you were safe, after all even he could not deny that the two of you had history, no matter how that history had ended. 

By the curb where the shadows met the dim glow of the streetlamp that flickered and waned as the wind hissed around the corner like the biting breath of apprehending fate, Tommy Shelby lit another cigarette and waited for you to walk by, the way he had waited for you every day in France and every day since. It was not something that he would particularly like the world to know, but to say that he had meant none of his words today was not far from the truth. The truth; as if you needed that. 

When you turned around the corner, stepping into the light as it fell upon you, it was all he could do not to step out and go to you the way he knew he should. The way you had probably thought he would, and now that he thought about it, it was getting harder and harder to remember why he hadn't. Somewhere along the way, somewhere in the blond of pretty, cruel Grace and the way Small Heath looked when you came through it for the first time back from France, he had realised then that he was never right for you. He loved you, he loved you, but this was for your own good. It killed him to hurt you, but he could not even imagine the hell that would ensue if someone else hurt you instead. Small Heath was not the place for sweet nurses and kind girls, Small Heath was a place for even the darkest demons of the world to shy away from. 

He knew that you had seen Grace, because he knew that she had seen you. She had made that very clear already, the sound of her shouting and screaming at him enough to make him think that, somewhere in Small Heath, you must have heard it too. All of their problems that were really only his problems, laid out on a washing line for the whole world to see. Tommy Shelby was a worthless piece of shit, but they already knew that and you already knew that and he already knew that too. What else was new, except that Tommy Shelby had yet another woman and Grace would not stand for it. She would stand for it, she always stood for it, no matter how many times he wished she'd leave she somehow always stayed. He was beginning to think she was not staying for him at all, she just made it look that way. And now, yet again, she was staying right here, the girlfriend of Mr Thomas Shelby, living in his house the way he wished you would instead, taking up his time and his love the way he wished you would. The woman he loved would never love him now, and the woman he didn't would never stop. The world had finally caught up on its debts against Tommy Shelby. 

Tommy pressed his cigarette into the bricks of the wall behind, sparks showering down onto his shoes and fizzling out in the gutter where the water fell drip by drip by drip. In the heat the pipes were cracking, water bleeding out from their wounds and painting strange patterns in the dirt and heavy dust. The thought of summer burning in his mind, Tommy brought his coat closer around him, straightening up as the cold rushed in around his collar. With a last deep breath, he went to move towards you and saw you standing not alone this time, but pressed against the church door with another man before you. You smiled at him, and Tommy had to frown at that because he had seen that beautiful smile all those days before, and this was so far from it. To be honest, you looked tired. There were dark purplish bruises under your eyes that reminded Tommy of those weeks where you stole snatches of sleep in the chair beside him, hurrying back and forth all day and all night for days and days on end. But now there was not that giddy, sleepless smile that you had had when you knew it was all worth it. Now you just looked... sad. 

It did not take a genius to tell who had made you this way. 

He had to grimace at that, his displeasure only bubbling higher in the pit of his stomach as you laughed at something the man said, bowing your head and he hoped you were not blushing. You were not his to lose, but you were no one else's to love either. And then the man was going away, and Tommy was breathing out audibly and realising that there was no way he could go to you now. He wondered if for a moment there you forgot about him entirely (he wondered if you remembered him at all), and he wondered if you knew that you had never left his mind for a moment since the moment you had left the station platform. 

And then through the street there came those dreadful words, the promise of Thursday flooding through Tommy's mind as he braced himself against the wall, hiding himself further in the shadows because there was no way you could see him now. He heard you, every word you said, when you agreed to go to the pictures with the man that Tommy couldn't quite see, and when you said goodnight too many times, and Tommy could picture you not wanting the man to leave, and Tommy could see your face when you fell so utterly in love because you had once showed that face to him. 

He heard the man turning the corner, leaving at last, and as he broke from the wall and stepped out into the street, he saw the last of you, ducking back into the church and closing the doors behind you. Tommy Shelby could never have you now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't ask me if her and Michael are going to end up together. I hate this motherfucker. We all do.


End file.
